Literature Quotations | Page 12

The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.

Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

Man may aspire to virtue, but he cannot reasonably aspire to truth.

Know what happens when an individual declares bankruptcy and how it affects his or her life.

What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.

I think that's a result of just a general increase in speed of the vibration of life itself.

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.

Form your life humanly, and you have done enough: but you will never reach the height of art and the depth of science without something divine.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

Crying over what's gone won't find the present.

Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.

Why do they put the Gideon bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late?

If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.

I do want to go another way - to write something completely different.

I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.

Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.

Most sermons sound to me like commercials - but I can't make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.

There have been no sects in the Christian world, however absurd, which have not endeavoured to support their opinions by arguments drawn from Scripture.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

For both faith and want of faith have destroyed men alike.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

The Public - a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.

My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public.

He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.

But if you're going to go out on a military unit, you've got to allow yourself to be under the control of the commander because you really could put the troops in danger.

In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.

No one could ad lib like Peter. You would think that it was all scripted, he was so poetic, but it wasn't.

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.

What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?

To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

Plants and minerals are bound to predestination. The faithful is only bound to the Divine orders.

Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.

Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage.

In all unmerciful actions, the worst of men pay this compliment at least to humanity, as to endeavour to wear as much of the appearance of it, as the case will well let them.

In a society which is structured the wrong way, piety has no effect.

Live with your century; but do not be its creature.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.

But when you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

New faces have more authority than accustomed ones.

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

These groups within a society can he distinguished according as to whether, like an army or an orchestra, they function as a single body; or whether they are united merely to defend their common interests and otherwise function as separate individuals.

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

I hadn't planned on going to law school. I wanted to study 19th-century Russian literature.

Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.

Our strength is often composed of the weakness that we're damned if we're going to show.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

How easily some light report is set about, but how difficult to bear.

There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything.

It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.

I do not read the ancient languages, but I am beginning to study Greek.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

Partial culture runs to the ornate, extreme culture to simplicity.

There is all of the difference in the world between paying and being paid.

Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.

I don't know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get to see are the flaws.

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

I give lectures for money, but all the money goes to charity. So, I make no money from it.

Believing in evolution is believing in the unproved, while believing in Christ is believing in the proven.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.