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Quotes About Writings

For a Latin work from ancient Rome to survive the next few centuries and beyond, it therefore needed to be transferred to parchment. But this conversion from roll to codex was reliant on the early Christians—the people who made the codices—deeming the writings of their pagan predecessors worthy of preservation and study.
~ Ross King
We can see that growth by arranging the gospel material chronologically, from earlier to later writings. As the decades passed, the early Christian movement increasingly spoke of Jesus as divine and as having the qualities of God, a development
~ Marcus J. Borg
Whether it is a natural instinct or a mere illusion, I can't say; but one's emotions are more strongly aroused by seeing the places that tradition records to have been the favourite resort of men of note in former days, than by hearing about their deeds or reading their writings. My own feelings at the present moment are a case in point. I am reminded of Plato, the first philosopher, so we are told, that made a practice of holding discussions in this place;
~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
Europe's history of trading relations with India is borne out in the writings of the ancient historians Herodotus, Pliny, Petronius and Ptolemy, and
~ Shashi Tharoor
She has admitted she was not hostile to the Nazis before 1940. She says she was anti-Nazi after 1940, but has produced no evidence that she criticized the Nazis then. She wrote anti-Semitic words in 1938–41, and there is no evidence she was compelled to write them. Queried on her anti-Semitic writings, she told me: "I have never written anything in my life that I did not believe to be true.
~ John Mearsheimer
he had been drawn to psychiatry, in spite of his recognition that those who became psychiatrists did so as a result of their own messed-up childhoods, always looking, looking, looking for the answer in the writings of Freud, Horney, Reich, of why they were the anal, narcissistic, self-absorbed freaks that they were, and yet at the same time denying it, of course
~ Elizabeth Strout
The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
For lives, I do find strange that these times have so little esteemed the virtues of the times, as that the writings of lives should be no more frequent. For although there be not many sovereign princes or absolute commanders, and that states are most collected into monarchies, yet are there many worthy personages that deserve better than dispersed report or barren eulogies.
~ bacon francis xvii
Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.
~ Alex Cox
A man of politics writes about philosophy: it could be that his true philosophy should be looked for rather in his writings on politics. In every personality there is one dominant and predominant activity: it is here that his thought must be looked for, in a form that is more often than not implicit and at times even in contradiction with what is professly expressed.
~ Antonio Gramsci
I admire the man's genius, I sense in his writings a strong kinship with my own mind; they have a macabre quality, a voluptuous flavor of mystery and evil which attracts me strongly.
~ Anya Seton
his writings to elicit a sense of realism while inspiring a call for social change.
~ Sinclair Lewis
his writings to elicit a sense of realism while inspiring a call for social change. Class, gender, and sexual preference were themes that he cared about, and he showed his readers that none of these factors actually mattered.
~ Sinclair Lewis
In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth." An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.
~ Emil Cioran
P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.
~ Bart D. Ehrman
When I first heard that I had won the prize, I thought that it was something for myself, that it was something personal, recognition of my writings. But there is such a strong reaction from Chinese people in particular. It's been very passionate, overwhelming and passionate, Chinese people from all over the world.
~ Gao Xingjian
My writings are limited to depicting analytically, but also polemically, the horrors of reality. Redemption is the speciality of other authors, male and female.
~ Elfriede Jelinek
Since the scientific community had largely overlooked Parsons, the OTO became sole guardians of his story. He became the Che Guevara of occultism, his few surviving writings pored over, his magickal workings the subject of intense debate.
~ George Pendle
only poetry, exempt from all practical applications, permits one to have at its disposal, to a certain extent, the brilliance and suffocation that Marquis de Sade tried so indecently to provoke.` Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004, p. 93
~ Georges Bataille
The Tolkien estate owns the writings of Professor Tolkien. 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' were sold by Professor Tolkien in the late '60s, the film rights.
~ Peter Jackson
The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment. The practice of doing this is the reason erudition makes most men duller and sillier than they are by nature and robs their writings of all effectiveness: they are in Pope's words: For ever reading, never to be read.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
History has been unkind to Ambedkar. First it contained him, and then it glorified him. It has made him India's Leader of the Untouchables, the King of the Ghetto. It has hidden away his writings. It has stripped away the radical intellect and the searing insolence.
~ Arundhati Roy
Shelves full of books are all around me. Opening the different volumes I take a look, and find the pages covered with writings in unknown scripts — tadpole traces, bird feet markings, twisted branches. And in my dream I am able to read them all, to make sense of everything despite its difficulty.
~ Jonathan D. Spence
It's hardly worth mentioning all of the hundreds of thousands of writings that have fallen victim to fire or intentional destruction over the centuries.
~ Erich von Däniken