Quotes About Literature

The story was heavy in her hands, the book spread open like legs, the letters very small i spite of describing such a big moment

At last I found love in literature, songs, movies except my Life. Should i thank myself for discovering the feeling or should I lament that it was never part of my life?

Read books and be happy.

People who know and love the same books you do have the roadmap of your soul. I believe that.

My early and invincible love of reading--I would not exchange for the treasures of India.

Books are best preserved in the minds of readers.

I am going to build a fortress of books.Will you come inside and live with me?

Reading brings us unknown friends." — Honoré de Balzac

The greatest treasures are books.

I've always said, stuff the engagement ring! Just build me a really big library.

After reading someone you love, wait at least an hour before starting to write

Reading should be like eating, we should have the dessert as well as the substantials. It would be a great mistake to eat dessert alone, and it is certainly a mistake to read light, frothy reading matter alone.

You will write better letters, you will converse better, you will enjoy social intercourse better if you read helpful reading matter from books and read newspapers very sparingly.

A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading.

What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare.

And as an essayist, I am not judged by other writers, book editors, and book reviewers, but by readers. Readers? Maybe, but wait a minute…not today's readers. Only those of tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. So, my only real judge being time, it is the stability and robustness of the readership (that is, future readers) that counts.

Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.

One conceivable way to discriminate between a scientific intellectual and a literary intellectual is by considering that a scientific intellectual can usually recognize the writing of another but that the literary intellectual would not be able to tell the difference between lines jotted down by a scientist and those by a glib nonscientist.

Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Lucian, or the poets: Juvenal, Horace, or the later French so-called "moralists" (La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, La Bruyère, Chamfort). Bossuet is a class on his own. One can use Montaigne and Erasmus as a portal to the ancients: Montaigne was the popularizer of his day; Erasmus was the thorough compiler.

Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius, Diodorus Siculus, Gibbon, Carlyle, Renan, and Michelet.

thanks to the literature on cognition—that, counter to what everyone believes, not theorizing is an act—that theorizing can correspond to the absence of willed activity, the "default" option.