Literature Quotes - Page 114

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

A word, once sent abroad, flies irrevocably.

Wealth should not be seized, but the god-given is much better.

We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.

And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?

I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

...our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding.

Human misery is too great for men to die without faith.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.

Madame Bovary is myself.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

Literature should be a kind of revolutionary manifesto against established morality and established society.

I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself

They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.

I'm tired of getting made fun of. The reason I took on The New York Times as ferociously as I did is that I'm tired of being the little icon that people stick pins in, the whipping boy for everything that's gone wrong in this business. Whatever my excess, I think that I've been trumped in many areas by others.

It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.

Whoso will pray, he must fast and be clean, And fat his soul, and make his body lean.