Romance is the poetry of literature. [ Mme. Necker ]
Literature is the tongue of the world. [ T. Paine ]
Literature is the immortality of speech. [ R. A. Willmott ]
Polite literature; arts in a university.
Libraries are the wardrobes of literature. [ James Dyer ]
Literature, like virtue, is its own reward. [ Chesterfield ]
We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal. [ Sydney Smith ]
Literature is the thought of thinking souls. [ Carlyle ]
Literature is a great staff, but a sorry crutch. [ Sir Walter Scott ]
It is the life in literature that acts upon life. [ Josiah Gilbert Holland (pseudonym Timothy Titcomb) ]
Newspapers will ultimately engross all literature. [ Larmartine ]
Taste is to literature what hon ton is in society. [ Mme. de Sta31 ]
Critics are men who have failed in literature and art. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
The proper task of literature lies in the domain of belief. [ Carlyle ]
In science read the newest works; in literature, the oldest. [ Bulwer Lytton ]
Literature is so common a luxury that the age has grown fastidious. [ Tuckerman ]
Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature. [ Emerson ]
Literature is a fragment of a fragment, and of this but little is extant. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Literature is full of coincidences which some love to believe plagiarisms. [ O. W. Holmes ]
Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature. [ Alexander Smith ]
No literature is complete until the language in which it is written is dead. [ Longfellow ]
Literature has other aims than that of harmlessly amusing indolent, languid men. [ Carlyle ]
It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains. [ Bulwer Lytton ]
Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature. [ W. R. Alger ]
Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye. [ Willmott ]
Literature is the grindstone to sharpen the coulters, and to whet their natural faculties. [ H. Hammond ]
Literature draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies. [ Lowell ]
The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college. [ Wendell Phillips ]
Literature is fast becoming all in all to us - our church, our senate, our whole social constitution. [ Carlyle ]
The progress of elegant literature and of the fine arts is proportioned to that of the public prosperity. [ T. B. Macaulay ]
Let literature be an honorable augmentation to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon. [ S. T. Coleridge ]
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation; the two keep pace in their downward tendency. [ Goethe ]
The history of literature abounds with examples of words used almost without meaning by whole classes of writers. [ William Mathews ]
In science, read by preference the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms. [ W. Godwin ]
Literature happens to be the only occupation in which wages are not given in proportion to the goodness of the work done. [ Froude ]
Literature is representative of intellect, which is progressive; government is representative of order, which is stationary. [ Buckle ]
There never was a talent, even for real literature, but was primarily a talent for something infinitely better of the silent kind. [ Carlyle ]
Literature has her quacks no less than medicine: those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth. [ Colton ]
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature an impossibility. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]
Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be not to write at all. [ Mme. de Staël ]
Literature positively has other aims than this of amusing from hour to hour; nay, perhaps this, glorious as it may be, is not its highest or true aim. [ Carlyle ]
The misuse of words in this literature of ungoverned or ungovernable sensibility has become so general as to threaten the validity of all definitions. [ E. P. Whipple ]
Libraries are the wardrobes of our literature, whence men, properly informed, might bring something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use. [ J. Dyer ]
The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humor and so little wit in their literature. [ Coleridge ]
Literature, as a field for glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; as a means of support, it is the very chance of chances. [ H. Giles ]
Before Greece, every thing in human literature and art was a rude and imperfect attempt. Since Greece, every thing has been a rude and imperfect imitation. [ James Freeman Clarke ]
Nothing lives in literature but that which has in it the vitality of the creative art; and it would be safe advice to the young to read nothing but what is old. [ K P. Whipple ]
No man will harbor any fear of degradation in the ranks of literature, because he has devoted his portion of ability and learning to the drudgery of a dictionary. [ C. Richardson ]
Literature consists of all the books--and they are not many--where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form. [ John Morley ]
The Grecian's maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy, many a speech to a sentence, and many a folio to a primer. [ Colton ]
Talent for literature, thou hast such a talent? Believe it not, be slow to believe it! To speak or to write, Nature did not peremptorily order thee; but to work she did. [ Carlyle ]
Ponder the lives of the glorious in art; or literature through all ages. What are they but records of toils and sacrifices, supported by the earnest hearts of their votaries? [ Henry T. Tuckerman ]
Literature is a mere step to knowledge; and the error often lies in our identifying one with the other. Literature may, perhaps, make us vain; true knowledge must make us humble. [ Mrs. John Sanford ]
Literature, when noble, is not easy; only when ignoble. It too is a quarrel and internecine duel with the whole world of darkness that lies without one and within one; - rather a hard fight at times. [ Carlyle ]
It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. [ Emerson ]
Fiction is no longer a mere amusement; but transcendent genius, accommodating itself to the character of the age, has seized upon this province of literature, and turned fiction from a toy into a mighty engine. [ Channing ]
He that will have no books but those that are scarce evinces about as correct a taste in literature as he would do in friendship who would have no friends but those whom all the rest of the world have sent to Coventry. [ Colton ]
Some new books it is necessary to read, - part for the information they contain, and others in order to acquaint one's self with the state of literature in the age in which one lives: but I would rather read too few than too many. [ Lord Dudley ]
The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, - a general preparation for whatever species of the art the student may afterwards choose for his more particular application. The power of drawing, modelling, and using colors is very properly called the language of the art. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]
It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind. [ Lowell ]
In some exquisite critical hints on Eurythmy.
Goethe remarks, that the best composition in pictures is that which, observing the most delicate laws of harmony, so arranges the objects that they by their position tell their own story.
And the rule thus applied to composition in painting applies no less to composition in literature. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Poetry deserves the honor it obtains as the eldest offspring of literature, and the fairest. It is the fruitfulness of many plants growing into one flower and sowing itself over the world in shapes of beauty and color, which differ with the soil that receives and the sun that ripens the seed. In Persia, it comes up the rose of Hafiz; in England, the many-blossomed tree of Shakespeare. [ Willmott ]
The mother, under whose sole influence the child is for years, from whom it acquires its tastes and character, should not only be educated, but educated in the most thorough manner, and have her mind stored with varied learning, so that she may be able to answer the multitude of questions that will be put to her by her inquisitive child on art, science, literature, and religion, and thus to stimulate his curiosity, and awaken his mind. [ E. B. Ramsay ]
Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye. Remember Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breathing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has caught a stray tint from his usurer. Features of exquisite beauty are seen and loved; but the old nature of avarice frets under the glow of devotion. Pathos staggers on the edge of farce. [ Willmott ]