Quotable Meanings of Literature
May 26th, 2009 | 
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Quotable Meanings of Literature
Here are some popular quotations which implicate the underlying meanings of Literature and the students may comprehend literature by viewing literature in different angles to boost up their critical literary approach.
Whatever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.
___Romans
Thieves cannot destroy it, and it is improved by time; it is the only monument that is proof against death.
___Martial
The only reward to be expected from cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.
____Voltaire
Literature is a kind of intellectual light which, like the light of the sun, may sometimes enables us to see what we do not like.
____Samuel Johnson
It is after public passion has subsided that out most celebrated writers have produced their chief d’oeuveres; as it is after the eruption of a volcano that the land in its vicinity is the most fertile.
____Stanislaus Leszeynski King of Poland
Literature is an avenue to glory ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honors or of wealth.
____Isaac D’israeli
Literature has been the charm of my life, and, could I have carved out my own fortunes, to literature would my whole life have been devoted.
____John Quincy Adams
Literature becomes free institutions. It is the graceful ornament of civil liberty, and a happy restraint on the asperities which political controversies sometimes occasion.
____Daniel Webster
National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.
____J.W. Goethe
All literature is yet to be written. Poetry has scarce chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of nature to us is, “The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I give you the universe virgin today.”
____R.W. Emerson
When literature is the sole business of life it becomes drudgery; when we are able to resort to it only at certain hours it is a charming relation.
____Samuel Rogery
In literature, in these days, the masonry is good but the architecture is poor.
____Joseph Joubert
Literature is a novel calling but only when the call obeyed by the aspirant issues from a world to be enlightened and blessed, not from a void stomach clamoring to be gratified and filled.
____Horace Greeley
The power of French Literature is in its prose writer; the power of English Literature is in its poets.
____Mathew Arnold
When I first tool literature as my profession….. I made a compact with myself that is my person literature should stand by itself, and for itself.
____Charles Dickens
Literature, strictly consider’d, has never recognized the people, and, whatever may be said, does not today. Speaking generally, the tendencies of literature, as hitherto pursued, have been to make mostly critical and querulous men.
____Walt Whiteman
Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.
____R.W. Emerson
Writing is not literature unless it gives to the reader a pleasure which arises not only from the things said, but from the way in which they are said; and that pleasure is only given when the words are carefully or curiously or beautifully put together into sentences.
____Stopford Brooke
The benignities of literature defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot be alienated.
____J.R. Lowed
In literature, as in every other product of human skill……wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and above its primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself of course, in the first instance) there “fine” as opposed to merely serviceable art exists.
____Walter Pater
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.
____Oscar Wild
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
____Oscar Wild
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
____George Bernard Shaw
Literature is printed nonsense.
____August Strindberg
Great literature is the creation, for the most part, of disreputable characters, many of whom looked rather seedy, some of whom were drunken blackguards, few of whom were swindles or perpetual borrowers, rowdies, gamblers or slaves to a drunk.
____Alexander Harvey
Literature is news that stays news.
____Ezra Pound
Literature exists for the sake of the people…….to refresh the weary, to console the sad, to hearten the dull and downcast, to increase man’s interest n the world, his joy of living and his sympathy in all sorts and conditions of man.
____Judge M.T. Manton
