Best tradition & literature Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”

Men Writing Country Whole Feelings Order Literature Existence Generations Tradition Historical Bones Simultaneous Individual Talent

Book:The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays

Source: The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays

“Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, revolt against the objectified world has determined the character of art and literature.”

World Art Character Lasts Literature Century Tradition Determined Decades Revolt Nineteenth Century

Book:On art and architecture

Source: On art and architecture

“When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of "popular" writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as "conjecture and refutation.”

Source: Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

“Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.”

Stories Literature Principles Sun Habit Conscious Concepts Tradition Structure Mythology Traditional Mature Metaphoric Sun God

Author:Northrop Frye

“From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.”

Knows Humans Home Today Literature Human Beings Essentials Tradition Instance Destructive Rooted Human Experience

Author:Martin Heidegger

“My work is based on a tradition quite distinct from the Eckersberg tradition, a Nordic line of development that had never been clearly and consistently defined in the literature on art. This line is not a straight one; it has the strangest and most fascinating twists and curves, and includes such artists as Edvard Munch, Ernest Josephson, Hill, Hansen Jacobsen, Johannes Holbek, Jens Lund, and Emile Nolde. Not all of them equally well known.”

Wells Art Artist Literature Lines Known Development Tradition Defined Hills Fascinating Consistently Well Known Curves Twists Nordic

Author:Asger Jorn

“Whether it is the old lady's fear, or the many ghostly traditions of this place, or the crucifix itself, I do not know, but I am not feeling nearly as easy in my mind as usual.”

Knows Mind Feelings Literature Easy Tradition Usual Old Lady

Book:Dracula - Literary Touchstone Edition

Source: Dracula - Literary Touchstone Edition

“Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is, by these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age.”

Thinking Men Art Age Beautiful Literature Sound Friendship Intellectual Tradition Performances Ripe Brethren

Book:The Intellectual Life

Source: The Intellectual Life

“Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.”

Firsts May Facts Poetry Literature Lines Generations Poet Tradition Connections Absence Rhyming

Book:Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

Source: Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

“Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver's Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children's book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That's what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story.”

Source: Rotunda: a selection from the works of Aldous Huxley

“Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand.”

Hands Literature Sea Land Tradition Fishes Heritage Far Away

Book:Selected Poems And Four Plays

Source: Selected Poems And Four Plays

“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”

“There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.”

“The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.”

Life Is Literature Women Tradition Tales Autobiography

Book:The Penguin book of women's lives

Source: The Penguin book of women's lives

“In many parts of the world, including the Arab world, the Latin American world, and even parts of the Western world, there is a tradition of writers being quite engaged. Particularly in the Arab world you have had very, very strong traditions of literature and poetry and most of the writers have been deeply committed to the cause of the Arab nation.”

World Has Beens Literature Strong Nations Causes Tradition Western Including Committed Engaged Latin Very Strong Latin America Western World Arab World Latin American

Author:Tariq Ali

“I never intended to be a historian of religion. My aim was to become a professor of English Literature in a university, but I had a series of absolute career disasters and found myself making television programs about the nature of religion and about Christian history and started to discover about other religious traditions, and that was an absolute eye-opener for me.”

Eye Christian Found Literature Religious Careers Television Program Tradition Absolutes Aim Series University Disaster Professors Historian English Literature Religious Traditions

Author:Karen Armstrong

“The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. [William] Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year [John] Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating.”

Thinking Years Humans Two Reality Literature Born Human Nature Tradition England Died Lifetime Raised Theology Classic Influential Renaissance Illuminating

Author:Marilynne Robinson

“There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.”

Writing Form Literature Novel Tradition Afghanistan Novel Writing

Author:Khaled Hosseini

“They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature, the ability to look at paintings, the sense of connectedness to the land, the sense of community that comes from people taking care of their own.”

People Looks Kind Art Care Literature Community Ability Land Painting Tradition Locals Attachment Connectedness

Author:Robert Hass

“The question now becomes about defining your terms. What is literature? Unless we allow it to encompass the oral tradition from which it grew, which means taking it back to Homer and beyond, it demands the written word - poetry and prose. [Bob] Dylan is no slouch at the written word, both in its own right, and transcribed from his lyrics, which have often been acclaimed as poetry and may well stand up as such. But that is not his métier.”

Wells May Mean Literature Term Written Grew Demand Tradition Prose Bob Defining Dylan Written Word Oral Tradition

Author:David Bennun

“[Shirat ha-Yam ] is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, pieces of Biblical literature that we possess. It is much closer to history than later traditions of the Exodus.”

Ifs Literature Pieces Tradition Biblical Exodus Yams

Author:Elie Wiesel

“I think the "crime novel" has replaced the sociological novel of the 1930s. I think the progenitor of that tradition is James M. Cain, who in my view is the most neglected writer in American literature.”

Thinking Literature Views Novel Crime Tradition Replaced Neglected 1930s Cain American Literature Sociological Crime Novels

Author:James Lee Burke

“I may love individual people, but I am contemptuous of the arrogance , and in a way, it's both ruined me and fuels me. It's ruined me because nobody cares about these issues, and then it's the source of most of my storytelling now, because I am so preoccupied with it. It fuels me, because this is my outrage. I do believe in that great tradition of literature and storytelling. You know, the downfall and the folly of it all.”

People Believe Care Literature Individual Tradition Storytelling Arrogance Downfall Nobody Cares

Author:Larry Fessenden

“If you can imagine the story of the world as a giant movie, to not have some understanding of the Bible - its story, its history, and its impact - would be like watching a great movie and removing part of the plot. It can't be done. The real truth is that everyone regardless of faith tradition benefits from knowing and understanding these aspects of the Bible. It enhances one's knowledge of literature, science, art etc. It's difficult to read any classic work of literature for instance and not see biblical allusions.”

World Art Real Done Literature Difficult Understanding Imagine Truth Is Tradition Classic Biblical Allusion

Author:Steve Green

“I think New York is working its way into my poems. It takes a while for a place to filter its way onto the page, but I've been reading more and more American poetry and I certainly feel it as quite a freeing force. Coming from the formally ordered tradition of poetry in Ireland, I find the expansiveness of American literature freeing in some sense.”

Thinking Reading Literature Tradition Ireland American Literature

Author:Nick Laird

“It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.”

Heart Hands Seems Religion Literature Greater Fine Ideals Tradition Dependent Second Hand Fine Things Greater Things

Book:The Letters of D. H. Lawrence

Source: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence

“I grew up in a place where everybody was a storyteller, but nobody wrote. It was that kind of Celtic, storytelling tradition: everybody would have a story at the pub or at parties, even at the clubs and raves.”

Kind Stories Literature Party Grew Grew Up Tradition Clubs Storytelling Storyteller Pubs Celtic Rave

Author:Irvine Welsh

“In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.”

Thinking Humans Art Book Facts Form Literature Born Views Fate Tradition Accidents Nationality Passports Dickens Barcelona

Author:Carlos Ruiz Zafon

“For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.”

Source: Angela Carter's Book Of Fairy Tales

“Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.”

World Needs Philosophy Literature Common Christianity Buddhism Tradition Including Senses Common Sense Indian Rely Taoism Hinduism American Indian Daily Living World Literature

Book:Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it.”

Believe Humans Real Religion Literature Jesus Human Beings Atheism Figures Evidence Tradition Ancient Mythology Despite Pagan Ancient Literature

Author:Dennis McKinsey

“Preserving tradition has become a nice hobby, like stamp collecting.”

Literature Nice Tradition Hobbies Stamps Collecting Stamp Collecting

Author:Mason Cooley

“English is, from my point of view as an Americanist, an ethnicity. And English literature should be studied in Comparative Literature. And American literature should be a discipline, certainly growing from England and France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and the Native traditions, particularly because those helped form the American canon. Those are our backgrounds. And then we'd be doing it the way it ought to be done. And someday I hope that it will be.”

“No literature is richer than that of the sea. No story is more enthralling, no tradition is more secure.”

Stories Literature Sea Tradition Secure Sailing Nautical Sailing And The Sea

Book:Vignettes of the Sea

Source: Vignettes of the Sea

“I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.”

Character Literature Walks Alive Particular Tradition Minors Dickens Twitching

Author:Donna Tartt

“The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.”

Hands Literature Higher Promise Ideals Tradition Historical Loyalty Patriotism Imaginative Projection Precedent American Patriotism

Book:The Promise of American Life

Source: The Promise of American Life

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