Quotes About Literature

I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?

There are those who believe we have need of more literature, of a large international publishing house, of a great peace newspaper, or the like. I am rather skeptical about this idea.

Indeed; peace literature is almost exclusively read, though to good effect, by pacifists, while what is needed is the canvassing of those who have not so far been won to the cause.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

If peace had a smell, it would be the smell of a library full of old, leather-bound books.

But I think that of all the literature that I studied, the book that did more than any other to fire my enthusiasm was The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey published by his wife.

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.

A Christian philosophy of literature begins with the same agenda of issues that any philosophy of literature addresses. Its distinctive feature is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith.

The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.

Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.

Socrates should have written comics.

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.

Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

Every trace of the old philosophy and literatureof the ancient world has vanished from the face of the earth.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law

Again, both literature and philosophy work by appealing to certain reigning idols.

Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth.