Quotes About Literature

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

But, indeed, we prefer books to pounds; and we love manuscripts better than florins; and we prefer small pamphlets to war horses.

I am one of the best five writers to come out of English music since the war.

The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.

Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.

The Forty Rules of Love is a wise, joyous page-turner... and one that speaks urgently to our war-ravaged times.

I am rather more apt to read old books than new ones.

'War and Peace' goes down a lot smoother than a Dan Brown novel, let me tell you.

I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.

My childhood library was small enough not to be intimidating. And yet I felt the whole world was contained in those two rooms. I could walk any aisle and smell wisdom.

There are people whom even children's literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.

When newspapers are the principal vehicles of the wit and wisdom of a people, the higher graces of composition can hardly be looked for.

Books tap the wisdom of our species -- the greatest minds, the best teachers -- from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient.

Some books we read, tho' few there are that hit the happy point where wisdom joins with wit.

He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library.

No furniture is so charming as books.

No furniture is so charming as books, even if you never open them or read a single word.