Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write? - Nobel Lecture 2000.

English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

Perish those who said our good things before we did.

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

Education is the state-controlled manufacture of echoes.

You are educated when you have the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, / The pen is mightier than the sword.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

Yet ah! why should they know their fate?Since sorrow never comes too late,And happiness too swiftly flies.Thought would destroy their paradise.No more; where ignorance is bliss,'Tis folly to be wise. - Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.

Literature is a power to be possessed, not a body of objects to be studied.

Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.

Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

For the high achievers, studying gave them the pleasing, absorbing challenge o flow 40 percent of the hours they spent at it. But for low achievers, studying produced flow only 16 percent of the time; more often that not, it yielded anxiety, with the demands outreaching their abilities.

A wisely chosen illustration is almost essential to fasten the truth upon the ordinary mind, and no teacher can afford to neglect this part of his preparation.