Literature's Greatest Quotes & Sayings

I've always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read. — Liu Cixin

If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power, and beauty that nature can bestow - in some parts a very paradise on earth - I should point to India. If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most full developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant - I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life, not for this life only, but a transfigured and eternal life - again I should point to India. — Friedrich Max Muller

I take many things seriously. Rudyard Kipling, Harper Lee, Oscar Wilde, and Elmore Leonard are all held in the highest regard. I am dead serious when I discuss the many reasons that Ernest Hemingway's greatest contribution to literature was his generous decision to take his own life. I will not be sucked into a discussion of politics by people who prefer emotion to reason. The designated hitter is an abomination, and the day pitchers and catchers report is the start of the new year despite what those ill-informed calendar makers might try to tell you." "I — Brian D. Meeks

For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes. — Ismail Kadare

What sort of person you grow into should not be achieved by default, and often that's exactly what happens to kids. I see literature as a method of guidance, information, and contemplation, and consider it the greatest compliment possible when a reader tells me that a book of mine really made him/her think. — Wendelin Van Draanen

Say, you told me you thought Les Miserables was the greatest novel ever written. I think Vanity Fair is the greatest. Let's fight. - Joe Willard — Maud Hart Lovelace

Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books. — Hermann Hesse

In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home. — Henry David Thoreau

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing. — John Berryman

Honesty is the greatest aphrodisiac. — Zan Perrion

It's worth pointing out that [Herman Melville] worked in [the New York Custom House] as a deputy customs inspector between 1866 and 1885. Nineteen years, and he never got a raise - four dollars a day, six days a week. He was by then a washed-up writer, forgotten and poor. I used to find this subject heartbreaking, a waste: the greatest living American author was forced to spend his days writing tariff reports instead of novels. But now, knowing what I know about the sleaze of the New York Custom House, and the honorable if bitter decency with which Melville did his job, I have come to regard literature's loss as the republic's gain. Great writers are a dime a dozen in New York. But an honest customs inspector in the Gilded Age? Unheard of. — Sarah Vowell

If I was asked what is the greatest treasure which India possesses and what is her finest heritage, I would answer unhesitatingly that it is the Samskrit language and literature and all that it contains. This is a magnificent inheritance and so long as this endures and influences the life of our people, so long will the basic genius of India continue. If our race forgot the Buddha, the Upanishads and the great epics (Ramayana and Mahabharata), India would cease to be India . — Jawaharlal Nehru

If, for example, you should happen to decide arbitrarily that you didn't like books written in the first person, or books about whaling, or patricide, or prostitution, or war, or wretched poverty, or divorce, or madness, or adultery, or homosexuality, or cripples, or the most erotic kind of fornication for fornication's sake, and thus should rule them off your list, you'd be doing yourself out of some of the greatest works of literature in the world's history- in fact, nearly all of them. What counts, it seems to me, is what the writer brings to his story, not the subject itself. — Charles Jackson

It is just the literature that we read for 'amusement' or 'purely for pleasure' that may have the greatest, least suspected, earliest influence on us. — T. S. Eliot

It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature. — John Drinkwater

As William Bernstein describes in 'A Splendid Exchange', 'The Arabs, invigorated by their conquests, experienced a cultural renaissance that extended to many fields; the era's greatest literature, art, mathematics, and astronomy was not found in Rome, Constantinople, or Paris, but in Damascus, Baghdad and Cordova. — Christopher Lascelles

Theater roles are written by the great masters. The greatest literature that you can possibly know are the theater roles like King Lear, Hamlet, and all of those great roles. So all you do is you dive into these unchallenged roles and see how far you can get, what kind of accolades you can get, and how good you can be in them. In movie roles, you can actually improve them by knowing a lot about your own stage technique, which helps a great deal in the cinema and how you can project inner humor even though the particular dialogue is not necessarily funny, but you can infuse it with humor. — Christopher Plummer

Do not speak unflatteringly of Jane," Flora said, walking beside Chad. "She is the greatest writer to have ever lived." "I thought that was Shakespeare." "William was, or course, quite good," Flora said. "But no one can compare to Jane Austen. — Krista McGee

Our language and literature are without a doubt Britain's greatest contribution to the cultural heritage of the world. — Tessa Jowell

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing. — Richard Flanagan

I do see why Nikki likes the novel, as it's written so well, but her liking it makes me worry now that Nikki doesn't really believe in silver linings. Because she says The Great Gatsby is the greatest novel ever written by an American, and yet it ends so sadly. One thing's for sure. Nikki is going to be very proud of me when I tell her I finally read her favorite book. Here's another surprise: I'm going to read all the novels on her American Literature class syllabus, just to make her proud. To let her know that I am really interested in what she loves. — Matthew Quick

Many of the greatest books are like a forest. The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost. — Anthony Esolen

Moreover, people invariably take a greater interest in the suffering of others than in their well-being. Hence writers must constantly fight against the most tempting of all tempatations-to advertise their misfortunes. Indeed, the greatest misfortune that can happen to a writer is to work in an environment where touting one's misfortunes passes for literature. — Minae Mizumura

I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors. — Douglas Preston

Other people had religion to give them a connection to eternity, and good luck to them, but religion was too narrow for her, too unforgiving, too literal. Literature encompassed everything, forbade nothing, endorsed nothing. Writers, like scientists, had the greatest respect for the world as it truly was. Their job wasn't to judge but to examine, to experiment, draft after draft, century after century. — Kate Grenville

Literature is map of humanity, the documenter of civilization. Books introduce us to the landscape of the greatest minds of every century. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The idea was flawed, of course," he said irritably. "Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living. — Tana French

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race. — Lafcadio Hearn

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy. — Gary Saul Morson

A principal aim of education is to give students a taste for literature, for the books of life and power, and to accomplish this, it is necessary that their minds be held aloof from the babblement and discussions of the hour, that they may accustom themselves to take interest in the words and deeds of the greatest men, and so make themselves able and worthy to shape a larger and nobler future; but if their hours of leisure are spent over journals and reviews, they will, in later years, become the helpless victims of the newspaper habit. — John Lancaster Spalding

From all accounts, it seems the faithful opposition is reduced to Gideon's 300. The day has arrived for Christians to engage the battle ... From now on, true Christians will engage the battle of ideas in academy. The time for giving up ground is over. Now we must fight. We must engage the [B]iblical worldview vigorously in the world of great literature. The greatests wars ever fought in history are not those fought by sword or artillery. The greatest battles are engaged in the realm of ideas — Kevin Swanson

Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest. — Jean Douchet

The greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die. — Saul Williams

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.
And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home. — Anna Quindlen

Today the ministry of culture is the ministry of defense. A hundred thousand Jews are fighting for their people's freedom - that is the greatest human creation in our era. It will serve as a source for literature and art for generations to come. [Answering question, why the government had not set up a ministry of culture] — David Ben-Gurion

I'm not much of a correspondent. My letters are not only uninteresting but sparse. I'm glad I don?t have to write for a living. It?s arduous work and the money is very uncertain. On those rare occasions when I wander into a bookstore it amazes me to see the avalanche of literature and semi-literature that is turned out weekly in this country. The people who write these things are either desperate for money or love starved. Why should anyone on a nice balmy day lock oneself in an office and hit a typewriter for hours on end. I think one of the greatest pleasures in the world is not writing ... — Groucho Marx

They [Narnia] are, perhaps, the greatest classics of children's literature of the twentieth century. — Douglas Gresham

And it has always been a mystery, and I've marveled a thousand times at this ability of man (and, it seems, of the Russian man above all) to cherish the highest ideal in his soul alongside the greatest baseness, and all that in perfect sincerity.
The Adolescent (or, The Raw Youth) — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Literature interprets the world, but it's also shaped by that world, and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since
well, since the early 18th century. The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It's about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever. — Lev Grossman

The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise ... The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature. We do not live by the ethics of the Iliad, or by the politics of Plato. Those who teach interpretation have more in common with the Sophists than with Socrates. What can we expect Shakespeare to do for our semiruined society, since the function of Shakespearean drama has so little to do with civic virtue or social justice? — Harold Bloom

Isn't the greatest rule of all the rules simply to please? — Moliere

The publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West in 1957 and the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Boris Pasternak the following year triggered one of the greatest cultural storms of the Cold War. Because of the enduring appeal of the novel, and the 1965 David Lean film based on it, Doctor Zhivago remains a landmark piece of fiction. Yet few readers know the trials of its birth and how the novel galvanized a world largely divided between the competing ideologies of two superpowers. — Peter Finn

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. — Milton Friedman

My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have. — August Wilson

I mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature. — Pat Conroy

Even though it inspires some of the world's greatest literature, music, and art, obsessive love is one of the most potent and compelling of tortures and one of the most difficult to overcome -- especially because it feels beyond conscious control. Tormented lovers try the patience even of those who truly love them, because they sufferers do not desire help extricating themselves though they claim to be seeking it; this is an illness from which no one wants to be cured. — Jeanne Safer

Here is a writer possessing the greatest talent: that of fully inhabiting the lives of others. Spargo conjures up these two as no one has done before. Scott and Zelda become, in Spargo's remarkable novel, not people of history but of literature, and reminders of what we fight for, what we fail to win, and the beauty that abides between. A marvel of a book. — Andrew Sean Greer

From the beginning of church history, music, writing, literature, and the greatest works of art all came from the church. To change the culture and make it a force for good, you have to be in it and be a part of it. — Patricia Heaton

One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer. — Caroline Kennedy

Knowing that others want to read my writing is the greatest inspiration to write. — David Rose

Well, when you have an opportunity to build a show around one of the greatest detectives in all of literature, you're going to jump at that opportunity. — Nina Tassler

The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool. And that works all the way from the external trappings to the level of metaphor, subtext, and the way one uses words. In other words, I happen not to think that full-plate armor and great big honking greatswords are cool. I don't like 'em. I like cloaks and rapiers. So I write stories with a lot of cloaks and rapiers in 'em, 'cause that's cool. Guys who like military hardware, who think advanced military hardware is cool, are not gonna jump all over my books, because they have other ideas about what's cool.
The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff. — Steven Brust

Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The Bible is the greatest literature of all times. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Vengeance is a strange human motivation
it can drive a man to do things which he neither would nor could achieve without it ... and because of that it lies behind some of the greatest sagas of human literature! — H. Beam Piper

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book. — E. M. Forster

Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages. Many things I read surpassed my understanding and experience. I had a very confused knowledge of kingdoms, wide extents of country, mighty rivers, and boundless seas. This book developed new and mightier scenes of action. I read of men concerned in public affairs, governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice. — Mary Shelley

Militant atheists seek to discredit religion based on a highly selective reading of history. There was a time not long ago - just a couple of centuries - when the Western world was saturated by religion. Militant atheists are quick to attribute many of the most unfortunate aspects of history to religion, yet rarely concede the immense debt that civilization owes to various monotheist religions, which created some of the world's greatest literature, art, and architecture; led the movement to abolish slavery; and fostered the development of science and technology. One should not invalidate these achievements merely because they were developed for religious purposes. If much of science was originally a religious endeavor, does that mean science is not valuable? Is religiously motivated charity not genuine? Is art any less beautiful because it was created to express devotion to God? To regret religion is to regret our civilization and its achievements. — Bruce Sheiman

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order. — Jean Cocteau

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)] — Carl Sagan

I said that the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature, true literature. I don't retract a word. That is a fact. — Robert Galbraith

But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present. — Tim Parks