Quotes About Literature And Humanity

#1. No matter how revolutionary people were, he said, they could not live without books. Without books, we would not understand the world; without books, we could not develop; without books, nature could not serve humanity.

Xinran

#2. One of my rules is never to look sideways at what other people are doing but instead, do what I feel is right.

Annie Bryant

#3. It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

Alfred North Whitehead

#4. Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

Nelson Algren

#5. Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity.

P.T. Barnum

#6. Science fiction and fantasy literature has always been defined by tales of heroism. It is meant to represent humanity at our very best, willing to oppose all odds in order to protect the side of good.

Mira Grant

#7. 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

#8. In an age that seems to be increasingly dehumanized, when people can be transformed into non-persons, and where a great deal of our adult art seems to diminish our lives rather than add to them, children's literature insists on the values of humanity and humaneness.

Lloyd Alexander

#9. Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

Alan Bennett

#10. I would have thought," said the prime minister, "that Your Majesty was above literature."
"Above literature?" said the Queen. "Who is above literature? You might as well say one is above humanity.

Alan Bennett

#11. Capital dictates the fate of humanity.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

#12. Literature is humanity talking to itself.

Norman Rush

#13. In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances

Virginia Woolf

#14. To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.
[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]

David McCullough

#15. In this perspective what I like or don't like disappears, because there's nothing left of me as a separate person: as a reader of literature I exist only as a representative of humanity as a whole. We

Northrop Frye

#16. A library is more precious than a bank.

Abhijit Naskar

#17. We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing - by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

M.H. Abrams

#18. Literature is the best thing humanity has. Poetry is the heart of literature, the highest concentration of everything that is the best in the world and in man. It is the only true food for your soul

Lyudmila Ulitskaya

#19. To achieve great success in literature you must have a certain coarseness in your composition... Really to move and influence men you must have complete understanding, and you can only get that if you have in you something of the common clay of humanity.

W. Somerset Maugham

#20. To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

Walt Whitman

#21. Literature is the memory of humanity.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#22. Literature is map of humanity, the documenter of civilization. Books introduce us to the landscape of the greatest minds of every century.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#23. Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

Glen Duncan

#24. Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.

Bernard Berenson

#25. Literature matters because it is how humanity, with all its losses and joys, can become a work of art.

Lisa C. Taylor

#26. Every soul that existed on earth is part of earth human history.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#27. It also seems that the unhappy writers are the enduring writer. Hampered or limited by their suffering, literature becomes their focus and salvation, forcing them to give their best every moment of creation. Writing becomes their medicine, their way of escape, the catalyst for their imagination.

Cirilo F. Bautista

#28. Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.

Ralph Ellison

#29. Real poetry is art at its purest sense. It is never a commodity, but a breath of eternity.

Subhan Zein

#30. Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

Harold Bloom

#31. Work! labor the asparagus me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow - security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself.

Sean O'Casey

#32. Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Cynthia Ozick

#33. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.

C.S. Lewis

#34. Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

Tom Robbins

#35. Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people - those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food;

Elizabeth Goudge