• That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

  

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  PoetBritish1772 · 18th century

  4.3 · 55 votes · 171 reads

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• The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

  E

  Ezra Pound

  PoetAmerican1885 · 19th century

  3.1 · 18 votes · 81 reads

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• The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wo

  W

  William Cowper

  PoetBritish1731 · 18th century

  3.6 · 48 votes · 27 reads

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• The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

  

  George Orwell

  NovelistBritish1903 · 20th century

  3.2 · 8 votes · 104 reads

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• The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

  

  Thomas Carlyle

  WriterBritish1795 · 18th century

  4.4 · 32 votes · 173 reads

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• The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

  

  Oliver Wendell Holmes

  AuthorAmerican1809 · 19th century

  4.8 · 23 votes · 141 reads

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• The book is your book. You have been responsible for every single thing on every page, every comma, every syllable is your work.

  

  Pablo Picasso

  PainterSpanish1881 · 19th century

  4.0 · 26 votes · 114 reads

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• The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

  J

  Jean Rostand

  PhilosopherFrench1894 · 19th century

  4.7 · 14 votes · 87 reads

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• The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

  

  Anatole France

  WriterFrench1844 · 19th century

  3.6 · 56 votes · 3 reads

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• The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

  

  Oscar Wilde

  PoetIrish1854 · 19th century

  3.8 · 48 votes · 62 reads

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• The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precep

  

  Leo Tolstoy

  WriterRussian1828 · 19th century

  5.0 · 6 votes · 193 reads

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• The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

  

  Henry Louis Mencken

  JournalistAmerican1880 · 19th century

  4.7 · 40 votes · 113 reads

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• The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.

  

  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

  PoetGerman1749 · 18th century

  3.3 · 41 votes · 65 reads

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• The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

  

  Oscar Wilde

  PoetIrish1854 · 19th century

  4.4 · 29 votes · 109 reads

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• The essence of poetry is will and passion.

  

  William Faulkner

  WriterAmerican1897 · 19th century

  4.7 · 23 votes · 144 reads

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• The existence of good bad literature - the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously - is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.

  

  George Orwell

  NovelistBritish1903 · 20th century

  4.9 · 24 votes · 168 reads

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• The eye is the notebook of the poet.

  

  James Russell Lowell

  PoetAmerican1819 · 19th century

  4.9 · 35 votes · 65 reads

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• The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

  

  Oscar Wilde

  PoetIrish1854 · 19th century

  3.7 · 11 votes · 102 reads

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• The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

  T

  Truman Capote

  AuthorAmerican1924 · 20th century

  3.1 · 8 votes · 152 reads

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• The good parts of a book may be only something a Writeris lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life -and one is as good as the other.

  

  Ernest Hemingway

  WriterAmerican1899 · 19th century

  3.2 · 10 votes · 93 reads

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• The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

  

  W. H. Auden

  PoetEnglish1907 · 20th century

  3.6 · 42 votes · 109 reads

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• The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

  

  Jean Cocteau

  AuthorFrench1889 · 19th century

  4.6 · 44 votes · 96 reads

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• The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too

  

  Ernest Hemingway

  WriterAmerican1899 · 19th century

  3.6 · 53 votes · 3 reads

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• The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

  

  Blaise Pascal

  PhilosopherFrench1623 · 17th century

  3.9 · 31 votes · 110 reads

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• The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.

  S

  Saint Thomas Aquinas

  TheologianRoman1224 · 13th century

  3.0 · 19 votes · 46 reads

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• The man is either mad, or he is making verses.

  

  Horace

  PoetRoman-65 · 1st century BC

  3.5 · 33 votes · 123 reads

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• The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

  

  Mark Twain

  WriterAmerican1835 · 19th century

  3.0 · 26 votes · 112 reads

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• The mere brute pleasure of reading -the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

  

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  PoetBritish1874 · 19th century

  4.4 · 30 votes · 197 reads

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• The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

  

  Oliver Wendell Holmes

  AuthorAmerican1809 · 19th century

  4.5 · 8 votes · 78 reads

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• The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

  

  Martin Luther

  LeaderGerman1483 · 15th century

  4.5 · 21 votes · 183 reads

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• The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

  

  Samuel Beckett

  WriterIrish1906 · 20th century

  3.9 · 59 votes · 114 reads

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• The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

  H

  Henry James

  AuthorAmerican-British1843 · 19th century

  3.7 · 12 votes · 119 reads

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• The only privilege literature deserves - and this privilege it requires in order to exist - is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.

  S

  Saint Thomas Aquinas

  TheologianRoman1224 · 13th century

  4.7 · 23 votes · 129 reads

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• The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

  K

  Katherine Mansfield

  WriterEnglish1888 · 19th century

  4.4 · 41 votes · 11 reads

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• The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

  

  Vincent van Gogh

  PainterDutch1853 · 19th century

  5.0 · 36 votes · 135 reads

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• The poet is the priest of the invisible.

  

  W. Somerset Maugham

  WriterBritish1874 · 19th century

  5.0 · 46 votes · 108 reads

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• The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

  

  René Descartes

  MathematicianFrench1596 · 16th century

  4.3 · 58 votes · 143 reads

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• The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

  

  Lord Byron

  PoetBritish1788 · 18th century

  4.4 · 64 votes · 111 reads

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• The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the

  S

  Saint Thomas Aquinas

  TheologianRoman1224 · 13th century

  3.4 · 40 votes · 160 reads

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• The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

  E

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  PoliticianAmerican1884 · 19th century

  4.4 · 57 votes · 156 reads

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• The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.

  

  Eric Hoffer

  AuthorAmerican1902 · 20th century

  4.0 · 36 votes · 118 reads

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• The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

  

  Abraham Lincoln

  PoliticianAmerican1809 · 19th century

  3.6 · 62 votes · 83 reads

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• The true university of these days is a collection of books.

  

  Thomas Carlyle

  WriterBritish1795 · 18th century

  3.8 · 60 votes · 7 reads

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• The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

  

  Walt Disney

  CartoonistAmerican1901 · 20th century

  4.8 · 18 votes · 66 reads

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• The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

  

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  WriterGerman1844 · 19th century

  3.1 · 50 votes · 74 reads

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• The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

  

  Joseph Joubert

  French1754 · 18th century

  3.5 · 53 votes · 23 reads

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• There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

  

  Charles Dickens

  NovelistBritish1812 · 19th century

  3.9 · 39 votes · 15 reads

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• There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  PoetAmerican1803 · 19th century

  3.1 · 31 votes · 58 reads

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• There are events which are so great that if a Writerhas participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

  

  Ernest Hemingway

  WriterAmerican1899 · 19th century

  3.7 · 12 votes · 108 reads

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• There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing

  

  Henry Louis Mencken

  JournalistAmerican1880 · 19th century

  4.7 · 24 votes · 22 reads

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• There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

  

  Henry Louis Mencken

  JournalistAmerican1880 · 19th century

  3.2 · 64 votes · 185 reads

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• There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

  G

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  ScientistGerman1742 · 18th century

  3.5 · 12 votes · 31 reads

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• There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

  

  Thomas Carlyle

  WriterBritish1795 · 18th century

  4.3 · 53 votes · 121 reads

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• There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not tr

  

  Henry Fielding

  NovelistEnglish1707 · 18th century

  3.8 · 54 votes · 184 reads

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• There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  PoetAmerican1803 · 19th century

  3.9 · 18 votes · 181 reads

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• There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

  W

  Wallace Stevens

  PoetAmerican1879 · 19th century

  4.9 · 57 votes · 27 reads

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• There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

  

  Emily Dickinson

  PoetAmerican1830 · 19th century

  3.7 · 60 votes · 181 reads

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• There is no robber worse than a bad book.

  

  Italian proverb

  Italian

  3.1 · 55 votes · 102 reads

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• There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

  

  Oscar Wilde

  PoetIrish1854 · 19th century

  3.5 · 11 votes · 77 reads

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• There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  PoetAmerican1803 · 19th century

  3.9 · 12 votes · 2 reads

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• There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

  

  Joseph Joubert

  French1754 · 18th century

  4.1 · 62 votes · 50 reads

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• This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.

  D

  Dorothy Parker

  WriterAmerican1893 · 19th century

  4.6 · 44 votes · 168 reads

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• This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

  

  Elbert Hubbard

  AuthorAmerican1856 · 19th century

  4.5 · 25 votes · 40 reads

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• Those who do not read are no better off than those who cannot read.

  A

  Anonymous

  4.7 · 56 votes · 137 reads

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• To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

  

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  PhilosopherGerman1788 · 18th century

  4.8 · 23 votes · 113 reads

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• To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

  G

  Gaston Bachelard

  PoetFrench1884 · 19th century

  4.4 · 8 votes · 30 reads

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• To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

  

  Umberto Eco

  NovelistItaly1932 · 20th century

  3.3 · 7 votes · 45 reads

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• To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intentio

  

  Henry David Thoreau

  PoetAmerican1817 · 19th century

  3.8 · 25 votes · 22 reads

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• To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all

  

  John Ruskin

  WriterEnglish1819 · 19th century

  4.8 · 28 votes · 19 reads

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• Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

  

  Henry Miller

  AuthorAmerican1891 · 19th century

  3.1 · 45 votes · 162 reads

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• Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.

  

  Virginia Woolf

  WriterBritish1882 · 19th century

  3.9 · 15 votes · 84 reads

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• War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.

  

  Mark Twain

  WriterAmerican1835 · 19th century

  3.8 · 8 votes · 58 reads

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• We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions.

  

  Henry Fielding

  NovelistEnglish1707 · 18th century

  5.0 · 58 votes · 87 reads

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• We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  PoetAmerican1803 · 19th century

  3.0 · 5 votes · 120 reads

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• What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.

  

  James Russell Lowell

  PoetAmerican1819 · 19th century

  4.4 · 57 votes · 35 reads

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• What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

  

  John Ruskin

  WriterEnglish1819 · 19th century

  4.2 · 24 votes · 167 reads

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• What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

  

  Henry Miller

  AuthorAmerican1891 · 19th century

  3.3 · 35 votes · 94 reads

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• What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

  

  Samuel Johnson

  AuthorBritish1709 · 18th century

  3.3 · 57 votes · 156 reads

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• What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

  

  Thomas Carlyle

  WriterBritish1795 · 18th century

  4.6 · 55 votes · 93 reads

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• When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

  

  Jean de la Bruyère

  French1645 · 17th century

  3.4 · 59 votes · 102 reads

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Page 4 of 5 · 344 quotes about literature

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