Literature, a diverse realm of written art, entertains, educates, and challenges. From ancient epics to contemporary novels, it reflects human experience, culture, and society. Through poetry, fiction, and essays, it connects people, evokes empathy, and inspires change. Literature is a timeless mirror of humanity, capturing its triumphs, struggles, and complexities, inviting readers on journeys of discovery and self-reflection.
Literature Quotes
1. “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
— C. S. Lewis
2. “Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.”
— P. T. Barnum
3. “Every man’s memory is his private literature.”
— Aldous Huxley
4. “Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.”
— Christopher Hitchens
5. “Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.”
— Samuel Butler
6. “Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”
— Henry Miller
7. “The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
8. “The crown of literature is poetry.”
— W. Somerset Maugham
9. “Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.”
— Carlos Fuentes
10. “The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.”
— Margaret Atwood
11. “The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson
12. “Literature is always about bygone times. It’s always looking back in time with a certain perspective. I look at bygone life which no longer exists, and as I said, I look at it without nostalgia but without anger, either. I look at it with criticism and with compassion. I look at it with curiosity.”
— Amos Oz
13. “A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.”
— Dario Fo
14. “Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.”
— Mario Vargas Llosa
15. “Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez
16. “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
17. “There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”
— Lawrence Durrell
18. “Asian literature is evolving with the people. It’s always a reflection on what’s happening to the culture at large.”
— Kevin Kwan
19. “I think the more you understand myths, the more you understand the roots of our culture and the more things will resonate. Do you have to know them? No, but certainly it is nice to recognise how deeply these things are embedded in our literature, our art.”
— Rick Riordan
20. “The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
21. “What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.”
— Paulo Coelho
22. “American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.”
— Christopher Dawson
23. “In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.”
— Andre Maurois
24. “The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.”
— Washington Irving
25. “Facts are not science – as the dictionary is not literature.”
— Martin H. Fischer
26. “We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.”
— George Ripley
27. “Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.”
— Camilo Jose Cela
28. “Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
29. “I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
— John Steinbeck
30. “I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature.”
— Muhammad Iqbal
31. “If I could have gone on describing to you the beauties of this region, who knows but I might have made a fine addition to the literature of our age?”
— Robert Gould Shaw
32. “All literature is gossip.”
— Truman Capote
33. “Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”
— Boris Pasternak
34. “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”
— Barbara W. Tuchman
35. “Literature allows us to be open, to listen, and to be curious.”
— Tracy K. Smith
36. “It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.”
— Salman Rushdie
37. “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
— Virginia Woolf
38. “I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.”
— T. S. Eliot
39. “A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.”
— Walter Scott
40. “It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.”
— Gao Xingjian
41. “My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric.”
— Jose Rizal
42. “Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.”
— Ezra Pound
43. “Science fiction and fantasy is a kind of literature that embodies the highest aspirations of the human race.”
— Harlan Ellison
44. “Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.”
— Vladimir Nabokov
45. “It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.”
— Hermann Hesse
46. “I founded a club, which is called the Brutally Early Club. It’s basically a breakfast salon for the 21st century where art meets science meets architecture meets literature.”
— Hans-Ulrich Obrist
47. “Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.”
— Helen Keller
48. “We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.”
— Seamus Heaney
49. “I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.”
— E. B. White
50. “There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.”
— Mao Zedong
51. “If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.”
— Andrew Denton
52. “At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.”
— Ruth Bader Ginsburg
53. “From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.”
— Jhumpa Lahiri
54. “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”
— George Washington
55. “Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.”
— Oscar Wilde
56. “Journalism is literature in a hurry.”
— Matthew Arnold
57. “Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.”
— Yahoo Serious
58. “For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.”
— Ama Ata Aidoo
59. “Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.”
— Ellen Glasgow
60. “I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
