Quotes About Literature

not sit while the wind went by. Is the literary man to live always or chiefly sitting in a chamber through which nature enters by a window only? What is the use of the summer?

We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.

I have known such joys the likes of which might have inspired a Homer or a Shakespeare.

books are the society we keep... Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.

The free men of New England have only to refrain from purchasing and reading these sheets, have only to withhold their cents, to kill a score of them at once.

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck

The written word is the choicest of relics.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world.

A written word is the choicest of relics.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is only another name for tameness. It is the untamed, uncivilized, free, and wild thinking in Hamlet, in the Iliad, and in all the scriptures and mythologies that delights us, — not learned in the schools, not refined and polished by art. A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvellous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen.

What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that practically I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all. The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.

I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a b abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.

Most people do not read; those who read do not understand; those who understand forget.

Comfort me by a solemn Assurance, that when the little Parlour in which I sit at this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box, I shall be read, with Honour, by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see.

a proof that good books, no more than good men, do always survive the bad.

An incident which happened about this time will set the characters of these two lads more fairly before the discerning reader than is in the power of the longest dissertation.

for as I am, in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein.

Henry Fielding's first novel was published in April 1741 under the name of Mr. Conny Keyber and sold for one shilling and sixpence. Although the author never owned to writing the short satirical novel, it is widely considered to be his work. An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews is a direct attack on the contemporary novel Pamela, published in November 1740, by Fielding's rival Samuel Richardson.

and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.