Quotes About Literature

To encourage Literature & the Arts, is a duty which every good Citizen owes to his Country...

[T]here are few mental exercises better than learning great poetry or prose by heart.

The sermon is now the true poppy of literature.

Books talk to you for an afternoon. Literature speaks for generations.

The test of real literature is that it will bear repetition. We read over the same pages again and again, and always with fresh delight.

Timeless literature keeps infinitely expanding, like the universe.

Classics are books that everybody talks about, and nobody reads.

Each man's memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.

Pseudonym: writing under a false name so that one may write more truly.

Two most important things in a writer's wallet: library card and poetic license.

Nothing is to be called a fault in poetry, says Aristotle, but what is against the art: therefore a man may be an admirable poet, without being an exact chronologer.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...

I eat bad poetry like a goat — and eat good poetry like a gourmand.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Prose is a photograph, poetry a painting in oil-colors.

What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

A proverb is an ornament to language.

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciæ of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day.

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well.

To me, novels are just quotations with a bunch of filler.

Miss Quote is so inaccurate She never gets it right; Miss Attribute does so too Forever wrongly cite, Spreading literary blight!

He lik'd those literary cooks Who skim the cream of others' books; And ruin half an author's graces, By plucking bon-mots from their places...

Quoter's curiosity is a disease whose only cure is more reading.