These literature quotes will inspire you. Literature written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit; or books and writings published on a particular subject.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging literature quotes, literature sayings, and literature proverbs.
Inspirational Literature Quotes
- “There is no remedy for love but to love more.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “Literature always anticipates life. It doesn’t copy it but molds it to its purpose.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “Literature is the thought of thinking souls.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
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“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
- “That’s what books are for… to travel without moving an inch.” ~ Jhumpa Lahiri
- “Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” ~ C. S. Lewis
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“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.” ~ Cassandra Clare
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“Perversity is the muse of modern literature.” ~ Susan Sontag
- “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.” ~ Barbara Tuchman
- “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” ~ Robert Frost
- “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.” ~ C. S. Lewis
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“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” ~ Fernando Pessoa
- “Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself.” ~ Henry Miller , Literature quotes about life
- “The amateur is very rare in French literature – as rare as he is common in our own.” ~ Lytton Strachey
- “The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.” ~ Lionel Trilling
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“Literature is news that stays news.” ~ Ezra Pound
- “When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he’s gone through, it means he was born for literature.” ~ Edouard Bourdet
- “All literature is gossip.” ~ Truman Capote
- “The duty of literature is to note what counts and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.” ~ Anatole France , Literature quotes on love
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“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.” ~ Jules Renard
- “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” ~ Ezra Pound
- “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!” ~ Luigi Pirandello
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“Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.” ~ Salman Rushdie
- “When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature.” ~ Raymond Chandler
- “The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” ~ Italo Calvino , Classic literature quotes
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“In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.” ~ Andre Maurois
- “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
- “Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they, therefore, remain bound.” ~ James Allen
- “In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.” ~ Toni Morrison
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“Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.” ~ Anton Chekhov
- “Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!” ~ D. H. Lawrence
- “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” ~ Jane Austen
- “There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.” ~ P. G. Wodehouse , Literature quotes on friendship
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“I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I’ve read has taught me something.” ~ Nicholas Sparks
- “You can’t teach a hunter it’s wrong to kill.” ~ Baba Hari Dass
- “There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.” ~ Charles Dickens
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“The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.” ~ Herman Melville
- “One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
- “The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one’s family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
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“The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.” ~ Stephen Leacock
- “Literature is my Utopia” ~ Helen Keller
- “But, indeed, we prefer books to pounds; and we love manuscripts better than florins, and we prefer small pamphlets to war horses.” ~ Isaac D’Israeli
- “He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.” ~ Joseph Heller
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“Truths and roses have thorns about them.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
- “If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop it’s being brought in from outside.” ~ Evelyn Waugh
- “When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign – a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don’t want to hear the word mentioned.” ~ Italo Calvino
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“Whoever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “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.” ~ James Connolly
- “A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.” ~ George Henry Borrow
- “Literature is the immortality of speech.” ~ August Wilhelm von Schlegel
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“What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one’s existence as a sexual being – while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up” ~ Susan Sontag
- “If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society’s own equivalent of oblivion.” ~ Joseph Brodsky
- “Literature is my Utopia” ~ Helen Keller
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“This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.” ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski
- “Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
- “The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.” ~ Vance Palmer
Literature, is a body of written works.
