Quotes About Literature

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

Et puis quoi, qu'importe la culture ? Quand il a écrit Hamlet, Molière avait-il lu Rostand ? Non.

La culture, c'est comme la confiture, moins on en a, plus on l'étale.

Polishing: a useful lesson for the hopeful writer. You say your tormented prose doesn't read as well as mine? Neither does mine, at first!

I libri pesano tanto: eppure, chi se ne ciba e se li mette in corpo, vive tra le nuvole.

I am speaking like a book, but I believe that what I am saying is true.

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in story-telling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes. By all means. And what shall be their education? Can we find a better than the traditional sort?–and this has two divisions, gymnastic for the body, and music for the soul. True. Shall we begin education with music, and go on to gymnastic afterwards? By all means. And when you speak of music, do you include literature or not? I do.

For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unaltera- ble; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.

longest of his works

Never trust what you see on Goodreads.

For no government of men depends solely upon force; without some corruption of literature and morals—some appeal to the imagination of the masses—some pretence to the favour of heaven—some element of good giving power to evil, tyranny, even for a short time, cannot be maintained.

repetitions. The Greek is in places very ungrammatical and intractable.

The rest of the Dialogue of Critias has been lost.

what Shakespeare was to the drama of England, Plato was to ancient philosophy

The Philebus appears to be one of the later writings of Plato

I read my eyes out and can't read half enough.... The more one reads the more one sees we have to read.

For what was a book if not a long consecutive surrender to the movements of another's soul?

It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other: and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterward in the hope of being in Paradise again.

You have ink in your blood, boy, and no help for it. Books will never be just a business to you.

Always remember the words of Descartes: The reading of all good books is like conversion with the finest men of the past centuries.

The first purpose of a librarian is to preserve and defend our books. Sometimes, that means dying for them - or making someone else die for them. Tota est scientia.

When you steal a book, you steal from the world , the Library propaganda said

No one with a book is ever alone, even in the darkest moments.

Books spoke mind to mind, soul to soul across the abyss of time and distance.