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Check our best-handpicked literature quotes and sayings from famous writers and authors for all those who have a love affair with books.
What are some classic literature quotes?
Ancient Stoic philosopher Cicero beautifully quotes, ‘ If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.’
Books are the elixir of life and should be cherished as one of the most critical assets of any individual’s life.
But if you look around, most people have a minimal attention span and show very little interest in the habit of reading.
Without reading timeless and classic wisdom literature, clarity and understanding of why we suffer mentally are hard to realize.
Without self-knowledge and self-realization, our lives are nothing but restlessness and mental frustration over unfulfilled desires.
Why reading wisdom literature is a game changer?
Only the company of wise books can help us remain sane in an otherwise insane world.
Money, respect, relationships, career, family, pleasure, comfort, nothing has ever sufficed our deep inner restless that we all experience.
If you look around and see sharply, the poor are unhappy, the rich are sad, the woman is unhappy, and the man, too, is unhappy. Nothing ever gives us everlasting happiness.
Only by relentlessly reading all the great philosophical and wisdom books can we have clarity about the nature of our minds and find a solution to be at ease from within.
Without understanding who we are and why we live the way we live, our inner dissatisfaction will not disappear. The mental ache will keep disturbing us in many ways in everyday living.
There are no shortcuts to a free life other than knowing from saints and, with faith, implementing their teachings in life.
We hope our curated collections of literature quotes will make you read good books for a great life.
Famous Literature Quotes And Sayings
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
– Oscar Wilde
It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.
– Gao Xingjian
Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing.
– Octavio Paz
The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
– Henry James
Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.
– P.T Barnum
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
– Herman Melville
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
– Andre Gide
Literature is a way to understand life, to appreciate living and therefore to participate in life to the fullest of your potential.
– Eric Chock
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.
– Mark Twain
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
– Ernest Hemingway
Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
– Joseph Addison
Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.
– Benjamin Franklin
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
– C. S. Lewis
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
– Boris Pasternak
Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
– Samuel Butler
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
– Ezra Pound
Best And Classic Literature Quotes
Literature is the question minus the answer.– Roland Barthes
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.– Mark Twain
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.– E.M. Forster
The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.– Anatole France
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.– Alfred North Whitehead
The crown of literature is poetry.– William Somerset Maugham
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.– Eric Hoffer
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.– George Bernard Shaw
If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.– Jean-Paul Sartre
Books are humanity in print.– Barbara W. Tuchman
Good children’s literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child.– Unknown
While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.– Cyril Connolly
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.– G. K. Chesterton
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.– Salman Rushdie
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.– Thornton Wilder
Literature is the thought of thinking Souls.– Thomas Carlyle
Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.– Isaac D’Israeli
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.– Cyril Connolly
A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.– H L Mencken
Literature Lovers Quotes On Life And Understanding
In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others.
– Andre Maurois
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
– Robert Fitzgerald
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
– G K Chesterton
It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit enable them to see visions and dream dreams.
– Sir William Eric Kinloch Anderson
Literature is, in fact, the fruit of leisure.
– Amelia Blanford Edwards
Literature stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature; it is his history.
– John Henry Newman
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
– Jean Cocteau
An interchange of literature is the conversation of nations.
– Edward Counsel
Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.
– Gao Xingjian
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.
– Salman Rushdie
Literature: The art of putting old words into new places.
– Edward Blanchard
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study; the fact that it consists of words, as we have seen, makes us confuse it with the talking verbal disciplines.
– Northrop Frye
Literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
– Cynthia Ozick
Literature is a lie that tells the truth.
– Dorothy Allison
Remarks are not literature.
– Gertrude Stein
Literature is at the center of those because literature is the great laboratory of myths, that is, the statement of reality in terms of man’s hopes and desires and fears.
– Northrop Frye
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
– Elizabeth Drew
Literature is the total body of stories and symbols that provides hypotheses or models of human behavior and experience.
– Northrop Frye
I believe all literature started as gossip.
– Rita Mae Brown
Inspiring Quotes About Literature
Literature is founded on the metaphor that arrests logic and the myth that arrests history; its works are objects of contemplation.
– Northrop Frye
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
– Susan Sontag
Literature, we said, is conscious mythology; it creates an autonomous world that gives us an imaginative perspective on the actual one.
– Northrop Frye
A people’s literature is a great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.
– Edith Hamilton
Literature is an art of words, and the student of it may be interested primarily either in the art or in the words.
– Northrop Frye
I am earth, overtaking all things except words. They alone escape me. Therefore, I lie heavy on their makers.
– Rudyard Kipling
People who are strangers to liquor are incapable of talking about literature.
– Mo Yan
Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.
– Herta Muller
The sole substitute for an experience that we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can’t tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.
– Richard Ford
Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.
– Jane Yolen
Literature is news that stays news.
– Ezra Pound
Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.
– Witold Gombrowicz
Words, when well-chosen, have so great a Force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.
– Joseph Addison
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
– G.K. Chesterton
We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
– Antonin Artaud
There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.
– P.G. Wodehouse
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
– Fernando Pessoa
I speak and speak, but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.
– Italo Calvino
Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
– Howard Nemerov
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