Literary Authority Quotes & Sayings

To me the mountain mass lies nobly mute,
The whences and the whys I don't dispute.
When Nature by and in herself was founded,
In purity the earthen sphere she rounded.
In summit and in gorge did pleasure seek,
And threaded cliff to cliff and peak to peak;
Then did she fashion sloping hills at peace
And gently down into the vale release.
All greens and grows, and to her gay abundance
Your swirling lunacies are sheer redundance. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition. — Peter Hoeg

In the humanist world following Erasmus, man is at the centre of the universe. Man becomes largely responsible for his own destiny, behaviour and future. This is the new current of thought which finds its manifestation in the writing of the 1590s and the decades which follow. The euphoria of Elizabeth's global affirmation of authority was undermined in these years by intimations of mortality: in 1590 she was 57 years old. No one could tell how much longer her golden age would last; hence, in part, Spenser's attempts to analyse and encapsulate that glory in an epic of the age. This concern about the death of a monarch who - as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen - was both symbol and totem, underscores the deeper realisation that mortality is central to life. After the Reformation, the certainties of heaven and hell were less clear, more debatable, more uncertain. — Ronald Carter

You could become internationally famous - you're Gemini, and according to antique authority have a literary talent, which of course your letters prove. — Ted Hughes

Really, we don't know what to make of it except that we're delighted about it. We have all these fans thirty years later and they're still around and will probably be around for a long time to come. — Russell Johnson

In addition to the alienation of farmers, large parts of the Mittelstand, growing numbers of industrialists and of the nationalist right by 1928, there was a further worrying trend facing the regime, the progressive disillusionment of young people and of the literary and cultural elites. The First World War and its aftermath had shaken loose many of the traditional ties binding young people to their families and to their local communities. As the Koblenz authorities noted in the early 1920s, 'the present sad appearance of the young, their debasement on the steeets, in pubs and dance halls results from the absence of firm authority by fathers and by schools during the war. The children of that time are today s young people who have little sense of authority and discipline.' In Cologne, it was observed that young people were spending too much time on 'visits to pubs, excessive drinking and dancing'. As — Ruth Henig

The concept of an author, the single creative person who gives the text 'authority', only comes later in this period. Most Old English poetry is anonymous, even though names which are in no way comparable, such as Caedmon and Deor, are used to identify single texts. Caedmon and Deor might indeed be as mythical as Grendel, might be the originators of the texts which bear their names, or, in Deor's case only, the persona whose first-person voice narrates the poem. Only Cynewulf 'signed' his works, anticipating the role of the 'author' by some four hundred years. — Ronald Carter

You've already said this is your dream job. And forgive me if I'm wrong, but I promised before God, Reverend Walsh, and a congregation of our nearest and dearest to 'cherish you, uphold your hopes and dreams, and keep you safe at my side.' — E.L. James

You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living
of every statesman
every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them. — Henry Adams

If you turn a blind eye to the world now, history will turn a blind eye to you later. Ignoring an issue makes you a tacit supporter of it. — Stewart Stafford

Gods don't come down in life to mete out justice. The powerful do it. — Pierce Brown

Write from Beyond what you know. From the authority of your senses. -author of Meditations in Green — Steven Wright

There is no harm in asking, only in letting an opportunity slip by without trying. — Stacy Stutz

All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within society. The individual was a new force in relation to the state. The threat of rebellion, of the overturning of established order, was forcefully brought home to the Elizabethan public by the revolt of the Earl of Essex, once the Queen's favourite. The contemporary debate questioned the relationship between individual life, the power and authority of the state, and the establishing of moral absolutes. Where mediaeval drama was largely used as a means of showing God's designs, drama in Renaissance England focuses on man, and becomes a way of exploring his weaknesses, depravities, flaws - and qualities. — Ronald Carter

It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom; or that which is established because it is right, from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view, by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact. — Samuel Johnson

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing. — Norman Mailer

The tension between autonomy and expertise had been, at a basic level, fundamental to the Protestant experience itself from the Reformation forward, as the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, increasing literacy, and vernacular translations of the Bible undermined the clerical caste's monopoly on spiritual authority. In the twentieth-century United States, professional specialization, the Progressive emphasis on technical expertise, and simply the ever more complex nature of modern urban life pulled readers toward greater reliance on literary guidance, while the logic of consumerism, rooted in the all-powerful choice to buy or not to buy, further reinforced the notion of reader autonomy. — Matthew Hedstrom

Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying no to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social, and even political. — Ignazio Silone