Quotes About Literature And History

#1. Actor training should be broadly humanistic, involving the study not just of dramatic literature and theatre history, but of languages, literature, and history generally, and should be centered on acting in plays rather than just exercises, improvisations, monologues, or even scenes.

Richard Hornby

#2. Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system.

Jules Michelet

#3. Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.

Teju Cole

#4. As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#5. Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.

C.V. Wedgwood

#6. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

George Saintsbury

#7. All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

William Dean Howells

#8. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.

Kurt Vonnegut

#9. Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget that the writing of history - however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity - remains literature. History's third dimension is always fiction

Hermann Hesse

#10. Those who read the Scriptures as magnificent literature, breath-taking poetry, or history and overlook the story of salvation miss the Bible's real meaning and message.

Billy Graham

#11. I think I was a good student, because I jumped over a school. My main interest was basically history and literature. Sports were basically basketball and swimming at a pool. I was so happy.

Shimon Peres

#12. We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

M.H. Abrams

#13. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#14. I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.

A.S. Byatt

#15. The history of the Bible text is a romance of literature, though it is a romance of which the consequences are of vital import; and thanks to the succession of discoveries which have been made of late years, we know more about it than of the history of any other ancient book in the world.

Frederic G. Kenyon

#16. Character is the aim of true education; and science, history, and literature are but means used to accomplish this desired end.

David O. McKay

#17. Rabbinic literature, though it includes plenty of material from before AD 135, tends to see everything in the light, not of a continuing story about God and Israel within the ongoing flow of world history, but of the much thinner, often dehistoricized world of Torah-piety.

N. T. Wright

#18. The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious.'

John Drane

#19. History is in charge of putting things in order and society is in charge of defining them. The more order we achieve, the more truth is hidden behind that neat surface... Perhaps literature is about throwing into disarray what has been defined... About making a mess of things, all over again.

Kyung-Sook Shin

#20. In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

Dan Simmons

#21. The history of interpretation, the skills by which we keep alive in our minds the light and dark of past literature and past humanity ... is to an incalculable extent a history of error.

Frank Kermode

#22. The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.

Nicholas Royle

#23. Sadly, we have confused biblical literature with history, and turned prophecy into biography.

Eli Of Kittim

#24. Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.

Dejan Stojanovic

#25. Vain, silly creature. Made for loving? Yes, but she'll have no lover, for I don't want her and she'll see no other.

Jean Rhys

#26. I learned more about history and literature in the used bookstores in DC than in college libraries.

Douglas Brinkley

#27. And I found there were myriad definitions of this thing called tragedy that had wormed its way through the history of literature; and the simplest of all was this: that it is the story of a figure who, through some moral flaw or personal failing, falls through force of circumstance to his doom.

Helen Macdonald

#28. I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

Robert Darnton

#29. Muhammadan law in its relation to women, is a pattern to European law. Look back to the history of Islam, and you will find that women have often taken leading places - on the throne, in the battle-field, in politics, in literature, poetry, etc.

Annie Besant

#30. A nation could change its way of life, its history, its technology, its art, literature, and culture, but it would never have a real chance to change its gestures.

Orhan Pamuk

#31. I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

Mario Vargas-Llosa

#32. My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.

Andrew Bird

#33. Rizal is a compulsory course in school, but few teachers make Rizal's novels interesting. If students are taught to enjoy Rizal's works as literature instead of as a lodemine of 'patriotic' allusions I am sure they would not mind reading and rereading the 'Noli me Tangere'.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#34. From the beginning of church history, music, writing, literature, and the greatest works of art all came from the church. To change the culture and make it a force for good, you have to be in it and be a part of it.

Patricia Heaton

#35. The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly.

Germaine Greer

#36. Omit a few of the most abstruse sciences, and mankind's study of man occupies nearly the whole field of literature. The burden of history is what man has been; of law, what he does; of physiology, what he is; of ethics, what he ought to be; of revelation, what he shall be.

George Finlayson

#37. Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.

John Robert Seeley

#38. Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

Walter Jon Williams

#39. Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

Carlos Fuentes

#40. There's a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called 'funny animal scrolls' were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.

Stan Sakai

#41. At age fifteen, Martin entered Morehouse College in an accelerated program during World War II. As the U.S. pledged to fight fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism, King was profoundly influenced through courses in sociology, history, philosophy, literature, and religion.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#42. I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.

Ralph Webster

#43. Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.

Richard Flanagan

#44. If children haven't been read to, they don't love books. They need to love books, for books are the basis of literature, composition, history, world events, vocabulary, and everything else.

Edith Schaeffer

#45. Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows of the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#46. As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years.

Debbie Allen

#47. Not only dowomen sufferindignities in daily life, but the literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science, philosophy, poetry, and song.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#48. Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history won't get bogged down in blood and marrow again?

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#49. How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

Polly Toynbee

#50. History is scholarship. It is also art, and it is literature.

Stephen J. Pyne

#51. Literature recounts history, explores knowledge, narrates universal themes of human existence, actives human conscience, enhances understanding of human motives, and explicates the nuances of human behavior.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#52. Words have their genealogy, their history, their economy, their literature, their art and music, as too they have their weddings and divorces, their successes and defeats, their fevers, their undiagnosable ailments, their sudden deaths. They also have their moral and social distinctions.

Virgilia Peterson

#53. From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.

Martin Heidegger

#54. In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined.

Leopold Von Ranke

#55. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it's here. And the hour's late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors.

Ray Bradbury

#56. As I think about anyone or anything
whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film
as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always where is the love?

June Jordan

#57. In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.

Abdourahman A. Waberi

#58. The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.

Michael Eric Dyson

#59. Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around.

Abhijit Naskar

#60. Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.

Neil Gaiman

#61. 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

#62. George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ... Literature"

Robert Kuttner

#63. The history of imitation of the older literature, particularly abroad, has among other advantages this one, that the important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit can be deduced from it most easily and comprehensively.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#64. School was rough for me. I was a good student in middle school, but high school wasn't so fun. I still pulled through, though! I excelled in art, fashion, history and English literature - anything creative. Math and science I struggled a bit more in.

India De Beaufort

#65. Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.
And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

Anna Quindlen

#66. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#67. Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

Robert Staughton Lynd

#68. Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Louis L'Amour

#69. When you realize that your history books and your science books and your literature books are not the result of experts sitting down and making it a wise decision, but of political pressure groups coming to the state textbook hearings, this is wrong.

Diane Ravitch

#70. It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs.

Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II

#71. The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.

Bjornstjerne Bjornson

#72. I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.

Matthew Pearl

#73. To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.

Polykarp Kusch

#74. It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

Gilbert Murray

#75. Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.

Dejan Stojanovic

#76. I would say if you are familiar with our history and the history of our art and literature that you see a clear cut pattern of people wanting to contribute, not only artistically, but in some practical purpose, for the benefits of the community.

Gil Scott-Heron

#77. In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.

Anne Bogart

#78. We honor the Greeks because in their art, literature, philosophy and civic history we discern the early stirrings of our own ideals - rationalism, humanism, democracy - which first took firm root in Athenian soil.

Caroline Alexander

#79. Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

Octavio Paz

#80. When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#81. An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

Roger Ebert

#82. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.

Tim Parks

#83. But ignorance of divine revelation affects all of thought and life, from one's view toward history and philosophy, to one's interpretation of music and literature, to one's understanding of mathematics and physics.

Vincent Cheung

#84. The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.

Terry Eagleton

#85. I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

Robert Caro

#86. As a filmmaker coming from one of the youngest lands in the world, New Zealand - safe, green and democratic - I was intrigued by Afghanistan, with its literature and poetry, its old land and its deep history.

Pietra Brettkelly

#87. Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.

Sarah Moss

#88. Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident - and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.

Thomas Cahill

#89. Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do, I might indeed have become an investment banker, an outcome that perhaps would have proved a more severe blow to the health of the U.S. economy than to the history of the novel.

John Burnham Schwartz

#90. When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.

Valentina Knurova

#91. At no other time or place in human history have social conflicts been so richly diverse, so vigorously articulated, so eloquently manifest in art and literature or adressed with such directness by the political system and the media.

Ramachandra Guha

#92. Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.

Anne Fortier

#93. I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.

Helen Dunmore

#94. I write to breath life back into memory to remind African-Americans of our rich and textured history. I also see myself as a "root," and for me the "fierce winds" include the marginalization-the downright segregation-of literature written by people of color.

Bernice L. McFadden

#95. Literature has always been a part of my life. I studied history and literature in college. My mother is a novelist; I grew up around books.

Elliot Ackerman

#96. By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.

Stacy Schiff

#97. The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history ... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

Rachel Carson

#98. I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.

John Waters

#99. There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that.

JJ Feild

#100. In every genre of biblical literature and every stage of biblical history, God is seen pouring out his grace on his people for the sake of his glory among all peoples.

David Platt