Quotes About Literature

You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.

There is a magic in some books / That sucks a man into connections / With the spirits hard to touch / That join him to his kind.

The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man.

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

Man builds no structure which outlives a book.

The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.

People are so afraid to say the word "comic". It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to "graphic novel" and that disappears.

I have always advised men to read

Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.

Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him.

You can judge a man by the books in his library.

There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.

Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

I do not see how it is possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired man.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.

A man will be known by his books.

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man.

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

Man's real genius and knowledge remains preserved in books

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honors or of wealth.