Literature That Saves Quotes & Sayings

There is only one time that is important - Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with any one else: and the most important affair is, to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life! — Jack London

Less emphasis on inventories, I think, may tend to dampen business cycles, because business cycles are typically in the grasp of inventory cycles and heavy industry cycles. — Paul A. Volcker

Honor sometimes means doing something very unwise. Behaving like an idiot is better than dishonor. To this day I blush for having chosen sensible restraint over common decency. — Amelie Nothomb

These are the seductive voices of the night; the Sirens, too, sang that way. It would be doing them an injustice to think that they wanted to seduce; they knew they had claws and sterile wombs, and they lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful. — Franz Kafka

Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up. — George Saunders

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair. — Evelyn Waugh

The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much. — Henry David Thoreau

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. — Alfred A. Montapert

The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis. — William Kingdon Clifford

I'm online, therefore I am. — Stewart Lee Beck

Speak roughly to your little boy
and beat him when he sneezes!
he only does it to annoy,
because he knows it teases! — Lewis Carroll

Culture is fundamental. Literature saves you. Cinema saves you. — Lea Seydoux

Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels. — Thomas Keneally

There is no Dubai and Abu Dhabi; we are one. Whoever doesn't understand this should do their homework before they start talking. We will be there for each other when we need it. — Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

It is common, to esteem most what is most unknown. — Tacitus