Quotes about Books and Literature

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. Cyril Connolly 

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. W. H. Auden

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature. Julio Cortazar 

The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed. Anthony Burgess,

Most of today’s books have an air of having been written in one day from books read the night before. Chamfort

The existence of good bad literature; the fact that no one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously is a reminder that art is not the same thing as celebration. George Orwell

When one can read, can penetrate the enchanted realm of books, why write? Colette 

Most people won’t realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship it like anything else. Katherine Anne Porter 

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Truman Capote 

A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lays a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes. William Sansom 

The bare objects of a book, or of a story, might also have a subtle relation to our own past. ... It is where lies part of the pleasure and urgency.  It is one of the ways an author speaks to a reader, and becomes integrated into the reader’s own imaginative life.  Even the most sophisticated readers read novels in the light of their own experience, and in such recognition, sympathy may begin.  Source: My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers. Ernest Dimnet 

Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse. Joseph Roux

The most thrilling version of the Bible was printed in 1631 by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the King’s printers at London. It contained several mistakes, but one was inspired, for the word “not” was omitted from the Seventh Commandment and enjoined its readers, on the highest authority, to commit adultery. 

A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read. Mark Twain

The illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is Amorphous, literature is formal. Francoise Sagan 

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. T. S. Eliot

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. Mark Twain

I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that nature with which I am acquainted. Mythology comes nearest to it of any. Henry David Thoreau

A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it. T. S. Eliot

Perversity is the muse of modern literature. Susan Sontag

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind. Thomas Macaulay

An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many and grows old with their sick hearts. Juvenal 

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous. Robert Benchley

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. Ezra Pound

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of the various, the possibility, complexity, and difficulty. Lionel Trilling 

There is much trickery required to grow rich by a stupid book as there is folly in buying it. LA Bruyere 

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right. John K. Hutchens 

Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon

A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read. G. K. Chesterton

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. Somerset Maugham

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn’t be mixed. And if they are, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink. Catherine Drinker Bowen

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Charles Lamb

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman. Boris Pasternak 

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Virginia Woolf

In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratifications, is a curious anticlimax. Alfred Kazin

Books give not wisdom where none before was, but where some is, their reading makes it more.  Sir John Harrington

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. Robert Frost 

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. Emerson 

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction. A. Bevan

Have you any right to read, especially novels, until you have exhausted the best part of the day in some employment that is called practical? Charles Dudley Warner 

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.  Salvatore Quasimodo 

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force. Montaigne 

The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. Emerson

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they are written. Thoreau 

Isn’t it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists? Kelvin Throop

My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out. Oliver Wendell Holmes 

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. Andre Gide 

Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard-covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five-cent books are different. John Steinbeck 

When we read too fast or too slowly we understand nothing. Pascal

Poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men. Goethe 

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. Georges Simenon 

The poet begins where the man ends. The man’s lot is to live his human life; the poet’s to invent what is nonexistent. Jose Ortega Y Gasset 

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words. Maurice Maeterlinck 

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself. Marianne Moore

The business man who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview. V. S. Pritchett 

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who are minded beyond reason the opinion of others. Virginia Woolf 

Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us. David Riesman 

Biography broadens the vision and allows us to live a thousand lives in one. Elbert Hubbard

The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books. Christopher Morley  

Few books have more than one thought; the generality indeed have not quite so many. Julius and Augustus Hare

Authors are sometimes like tomcats; they distrust all other toms, but they are kind to kittens. Malcolm Cowley 

The poet camouflages, in the expression of joy, his despair at not having found its reality.  Max Jacob 

He that does not expect a million readers should not write a line. Goethe

The first thing to have in a library is a shelf. From time to time this can be decorated with literature, but the shelf is the main thing. Finley Peter Dunne 

Those things, for which we find words, are things that we have already overcome. Nietzsche 

There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it. Longfellow

As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical. Longfellow 

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write. Epictetus 

Journalism is literature in a hurry. Matthew Arnold

We poets in our youth begin in gladness; but thereof come in the end despondency and madness. William Wordsworth 

Quotes about Civilization and Culture

Potala Palace Tibet

The crimes of extreme civilization are probably worse than those of extreme barbarism, because of their refinement, the corruption they presuppose, and their superior degree of intellectuality. Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly 

America may be unique in being a country which has leaped from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization. John O’Hara

Human life in common is only made possible when a majority come together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. Sigmund Freud

A nation advances in civilization by increasing in wealth and population, and by multiplying the accessories and paraphernalia of life. William Ralph Inge

One cannot raise the bottom of a society without benefiting everyone above. Michael Harrington

A cheerful, intelligent face is the end of culture. Emerson

Every social system is more or less against nature, and at every moment nature is at work to reclaim her rights. Paul Valery

As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure. John Dewey

Every society to which you remain bound robs you of a part of your essence, and replaces it with a speck of the gigantic personality which is its own. Jose Rodo 

Wherein does barbarism consist, unless in not appreciating what is excellent. Goethe

The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces, the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved. Bertrand Russell 

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries. Mark Twain

The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man which it forms. If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious, if it injures the conscience it is criminal. Henri Frederick Amiel  

Culture is simply how one lives and is connected to history by habit.  Le Roi Jones

In civilized society we all depend upon each other and our happiness is very much owing to the good opinion of mankind. Samuel Johnson  

The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur. Alfred North Whitehead

Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizes of man. Benjamin Disraeli

A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions. Alfred North Whitehead 

In the dust where we have buried the silent races and their abominations we have buried so much of the delicate magic of life. D. H. Lawrence 

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, no, but the kind of man the country turns out. Emerson

Learning is nothing without cultivated manners, but when the two are combined in a woman, you have one of the most exquisite products of civilization. Andre Maurois 

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others. Santayana 

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the present with the past. Neither in countries without a present nor in those without a past is it to be discovered. Cyril Connolly 

Culture has never the translucidities’ of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture. Frantz Fanon 

Civilization does everything for the mind and favors it entirely at the expense of the body. Napoleon 

What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses. Rousseau 

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit. Matthew Arnold

Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures. Walter Lippmann

Culture is the one thing we cannot deliberately aim at. It is product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake. T. S. Eliot

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better of equal hope in the world? Abraham Lincoln 

A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them. Saint-Exupery 

Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival. William Ralph Inge 

The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being, which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error. Walter Lippmann

A good civilization spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilization stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella; artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform. G. K. Chesterton

The chaos of our society is the product of the dishevelment of our ideas. Philip Wylie

Necessity reconciles and brings men together, and this accidental connection afterward forms itself into laws.  Montaigne

In a state of nature the weakest go to the wall; in a state of over-refinement, both the weak and strong go to the gutter. Elbert Hubbard

We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all. Emerson

Human history, if you read it right, is the record of the efforts to tame father. Next to striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male. Max Lerner

Society is a kind of parent to its members. If it, and they, are to thrive, its values must be clear, coherent and generally acceptable. Milton R Sapirstein 

Our culture impedes the clear definition of any faithful self-image; indeed, of any clear image whatever. We do not break images; there are few iconoclasts among us. Instead, we blur and soften them. Edgar Z. Friedenberg  

Quotes about Retribution

Get Revenge; live long enough to be a problem for your children. Unknown

Quite often good things have harmful consequences. There are instances of men who have been ruined by their money or killed by their courage. Aristotle 

He that makes his law a curse; by his own law shall surely die. William Blake

There’s no need to hang about waiting for the last judgment; it takes place every day.  Albert Camus

God gives each his due at the time allotted.  Euripides 

The response man has the greatest difficulty in tolerating is pity, especially when he warrants it. Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance, but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker. Balzac 

Half of the results of a good intention are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good. Mark twain

Since women do most delight in revenge, it may seem but feminine manhood to be vindictive. Sir Thomas Browne

In imperialism nothing fails like success. If the conqueror oppresses his subjects, they will become fanatical patriots, and sooner or later have their revenge; if he treats them well, and governs them for their good, they will multiply faster than their rulers, till they claim their independence. William Ralph Inge

The laws of changeless justice bind oppressor and oppressed; and, close as sin and suffering joined we march to fate abreast. John Whittier

Revenge is a much more punctual paymaster than gratitude. Charles Caleb Colton

Speaking generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it sharpens the consciousness of alienation, and it strengthens the power of resistance.  Nietzsche  

The consequences of our actions take hold of us quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have improved. Nietzsche

There’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another. E. B. White

Punishment without justice is bearable. Besides, it has a name which guarantees our innocents; misfortune.  Albert Camus 

Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness. Confucius

There exists among the intolerable degraded, the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real. James Baldwin

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it does singe yourself. Shakespeare 

According to one memoirist growing up with the Indonesian fayu tribe:
If I were a fayu warrior, and a member of a different clan killed my brother, I, along with my entire family and clan, would have the obligation to avenge his death, the same as if we believed them to have cursed him with some disease.  The retribution would not be limited to the offending party, but could justifiably include any member of his clan.  For the purposes of the blood feud, people within a clan were viewed as interchangeable, and any death would satisfy the demand for revenge. In turn, this clan would be obligated to avenge the death of the person I killed, and thus continue the cycle of violence.  Source: Child of the Jungle: The True Story of a Girl Caught between two Worlds by Sabine Kuegler.

Deep childhood hurts are always recalled, no matter the fame or eminence achieved by the later adult.  In her memoir, actress Maureen O'Hara recounts, in terms of her favorite doll: 
My brother Charlie and his friend Sam Lombard kidnapped my plastic doll and then burned her at the stake in a game of Cowboys and Indians.  I was so traumatized by it that I swore revenge, that I'd make Sam Lombard Pay for what he had done. …  We were all at the beach.  I watched Sam playing in the sand without a care in the world.  I sneaked up behind him when his back was turned, locked my arms around him tightly and then carried him out to the sea.  I walked him right into the water and held him down under it, letting him up for air only when I saw the panic in his eyes.  “That’s for my doll,” I said with a smile. Then I casually walked back to the shore and continued with my sand castle.

Source: Tis Herself: An Autobiography by Maureen O'Hara and John Nicoletti 

Quotes about Parenthood

Where parents do too much for their children, the children will not do much for themselves. Elbert Hubbard

Children sweeten labors, but they make misfortunes more bitter; they increase the cares of life, but they mitigate the remembrance of death.  Francis Bacon

Romance fails us and so do friendships, but the relationship of parent and child, less noisy than all others, remains indelible and indestructible, the strongest relationship on earth. Theodor Reik

What the mother sings in the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin. Henry Ward Beecher

A rich child often sits in a poor mothers lap. Unknown

Lucky that man, whose children make his happiness in life and not his grief the anguished disappointment of his hopes. Euripides 

When a woman is twenty, a child deforms her; when she is thirty, he preserves her; and when forty, he makes her young again. Leon Blum

Our women’s bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are working-out of the process of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point. Phyllis Ginley

Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together. Pearl S. Buck

You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular. Robert Frost

In the mind of a woman, to give birth to a child is the short cut to omniscience. Gelett Burgess

A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children’s affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection. Montaigne 

One of the most visible effects of a child’s presence in the household is to turn the worthy parents into complete idiots when, without him, they would perhaps have remained mere imbeciles. Georges Courteline 

There is not so much comfort in the having of children as there is sorrow in parting with them. Thomas Fuller

The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.  Bertrand Russell 

Schoolmasters and parents exist to be grown out of.  John Wolfendon

Memoirist Livia Bitton-Jackson recounts her ache for the maternal praise and affection enjoyed by her friends.  Having voiced her sense of rejection, her mother replied with a smile, “I don’t believe in cuddling.  Life is tough, and cuddling makes you soft. How will you face life’s difficulties if I keep cuddling you?  You’re too sensitive as it is; if I would take you on my lap, you would never want to get off.  You’d become as soft as butter, unable to stand up to life’s challenges.”  Sadly, the author was not convinced by this explanation. She believed the lack of hugs and compliments was due to her mother’s finding her unappealing and plain.  Source: I have lived a thousand years: growing up in the holocaust by Livia Bitton-Jackson

One of the most delightful anecdotes in Brian Jay Jones book: Jim Henson, The Biography, he recounts the way Henson dealt with his son, Brian.  At five years old, Brian worked for a week on his father’s program,  featuring the Muppet's.  At the end of that week, Jim Henson presented his son with a check for $50, explaining that Brian had earned it.  He then suggested they go to the bank, where he would set up an account, and begin earning interest.  As a grown man, Brian reflects on this incident with pride in that his father had shown him the roots of both working and saving.  

Quotes about Tradition and Custom

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form is a wrapping of traditions, hearsay, and mere words. Thomas Carlyle 

It is pure illusion to think that an opinion that passed down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false. Pierre Bayle

We must work in harmony with nature once again and reconnect man with the organic roots of his being, with the healing timelessness of living tradition. Prince Charles

Since custom is the principal magistrate of man’s life, let men by all means endeavor to obtain good customs. Francis Bacon

It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one’s uncles. George Bernard Shaw

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think. Oliver Wendell Holmes

Tradition, thou art for suckling children; thou art the enlivening milk for babes, but no meat for men is in there. Stephen Crane

We're all so clogged with dead ideas passed from generation to generation that even the best of us don't know the way out. Peter Weiss

A society in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation is a society which is on its way out.  Hubbard

Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted. Pascal

The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens. Alexis De Tocqueville

Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated people need not speak at all. Louis Kronenberger 

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. Thoreau

To almost all men the state of things under which they have been used to live seems to be the necessary state of things. Thomas Babington Macaulay 

We must not judge the society of the future by considering whether or not we should like to live in it; the question is whether those who have grown up in it will be happier than those who have grown up in our society or those of the past. Joseph Wood Krutch

We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against Nature. Plutarch

He, who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. John Stuart Mill 

Experience and understanding are our rather abstract god-figures, and ignorance and stupidity will make them angry. Our schools and universities are our religious training centers, our libraries, museums, art galleries, theaters, concert halls and sports arenas are our places of communal worship. Desmond Morris

There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned. Joseph Wood Krutch

There is nothing so extreme that is not allowed by the custom of some nation or other. Montaigne 

Tradition is a guide not a jailer. Somerset Maugham  

As the daughter of missionaries, Sabine Kuegler and her two siblings grew up in a remote area of Indonesia where a tribe called the Fayu is faced with the probability of extinction.  As children do, she regarded their customs as natural.  By way of example, she recounts:

There are three stages of friendship in the Fayu Culture. The first is marked by napping next to one another with forefingers intertwined.  The second involves gentle chewing of the other person’s fingers, and the third and highest stage is expressed by exchanging crocodile teeth.  Each person places a few strands of his or her hair inside the hollow tooth, and then ties it around the other person’s neck. The Fayu believe that in order to curse a person, you must have a piece of his or her hair, so by giving someone your hair, you are indicating that you trust him or her not to use it to hurt you.  Source: Child of the Jungle: The True Story of a Girl Caught between two Worlds by Sabine Kuegler.