Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations on Literature

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
Joseph Addison (1672–1719) English Essayist, Poet, Playwright, Politician

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French Poet, Playwright, Film Director

Literature has now become a game in which the booksellers are the kings; the critics, the knaves; the public, the pack; and the poor author, the mere table or thing played upon.
Charles Caleb Colton (c.1780–1832) English Clergyman, Aphorist

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French Philosopher, Psychoanalyst, Poet

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American Novelist, Short-Story Writer

All literature is gossip.
Truman Capote (1924–84) American Novelist

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) American Children’s Books Writer, Novelist, Short Story Writer

Nothing lives in literature but that which has in it the vitality of creative art; and it would be safe advice to the young to read nothing but what is old.
Edwin Percy Whipple (1819–86) American Literary Critic

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) Irish-born British Academic, Author, Literary Scholar

The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.
Anatole France (1844–1924) French Novelist

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic

An hour spent in the library is worth a month in the laboratory.
Unknown

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, Sr. (1809–94) American Physician, Essayist

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers—such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian Dissident Novelist

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) Czech Dramatist, Statesman

When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.
Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) American Novelist

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist

Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian Revolutionary Leader

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Italo Calvino (1923–85) Italian Novelist, Essayist, Journalist

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American Novelist, Playwright

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.
Indian Proverb

Literature is a great staff, but a sorry crutch.
Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish Novelist, Poet, Playwright, Lawyer

The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.
Eric Hoffer (1902–83) American Philosopher, Author

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Helen Keller (1880–1968) American Author

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author’s political views.
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American Novelist, Short-story Writer

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 (1903–50) English Novelist, Journalist

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
W. H. Auden (1907–73) British-born American Poet, Dramatist

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 (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) American Poet, Translator, Critic

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