L Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with L. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”
“Literature is the immortality of speech.”
“literature is the last banquet between minds.”
“Literature is the memory of humanity.”
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
Source: Numbers: 4
“Literature is the most beautiful of countries”
“Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man.”
Source: The Portable Edgar Allan Poe
“Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.”
Source: A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard
“Literature is the notation of the heart.”
“Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.”
“Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everythingin every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.”
“Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.”
“Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.”
“Literature is the opiate of the educated masses.”
“Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.”
“Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.”
“Literature is the original Internet – every footnote, every citation, every allusion is essentially a hyperlink to another text, to another mind.”
“Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.”
Source: Gilles Deleuze
“Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.”
“Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.”
“Literature is the question minus the answer.”
“Literature is the real life of imaginary people.”
“literature is the record of our discontent.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.”
“Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness.”
“Literature is the thought of thinking souls.”
Source: Autobiography of J.S. Mill & on Liberty; Characteristics, Inaugural Address at Edinburgh & Sir Walter Scott
“Literature is the voice of the age and the state; the character, energy, and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds; they are organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires.”
Source: Selections from the Works of Edward Everett: With a Sketch of His Life
“Literature is the voice of the human heart.”
“Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.”
Source: Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1893-1909
“Literature is what you write when you think you should be saying something. Writing begins when you'd rather be doing anything else: and you've just done it.”
Source: The Journal of Albion Moonlight
“Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.”
“Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.”
Source: Bruissement de la Langue
“Literature is, in fact, the fruit of leisure.”
Source: Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers
“Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.”
Source: Conversations with Philip Roth
“Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.”
Source: Strange Bodies
“Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouth-filling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities.”
Source: The Educated Imagination
“Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.”
Source: Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands
“Literature makes history come to life. It is maybe the most accurate depiction of history, especially literature that was written in the time period depicted in the story.”
“Literature may be false, but it is not trivial.”
“Literature may be light as a cobweb, but it must be fastened down to life at the four corners.”
“Literature may make the reader reexamine some of his or her own conventions, look at himself or herself in a different way, look at others in a different way. This goes way beyond just making statements or manifesting principles.”
“Literature may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.”
“Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.”
“Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.”
“Literature must spring from the deep and submerged humus of our life.”
Source: Ripening: Selected Work
“Literature nowadays is a trade... the successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets.”
Source: New Grub Street
“Literature of any kind can teach us a lot, but any text refuting scrutiny makes the skull a vacant lot.”
Source: Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo
“Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.”
Source: Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln
“Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.”
“Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation.”