Top 68 Quotes About Power Of Literature
#1. Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.
Katherine Paterson
#2. 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
#3. This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is being used merely to create the occasional pleasing contrast to the general ballooning of verbiage.
Italo Calvino
#4. I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.
Douglas Preston
#5. I believe that the power of literature is stronger than the power of tyranny.
Ma Jian
#6. No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.
Nicole Krauss
#7. The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the individual life in a way that expands our understanding of some previously unseen or unarticulated aspect of existence.
Nicole Krauss
#8. I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying.
Ivan Klima
#9. Actually, the true story of a person's life can never be written. It is beyond the power of literature. The full tale of any life would be both utterly boring and utterly unbelievable.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#10. When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.
Maya Angelou
#11. If conversation be an art, like painting, sculpture, and literature, it owes its most power charm to nature; and the least shade of formality or artifice destroys the effect of the best collection of words.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman
#12. Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.
H.G.Wells
#13. The fairy tale belongs to the poor ... I know of no fairy tale which upholds the tyrant, or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairy tale is an absurdity.
Erik Christian Haugaard
#14. I don't feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that's something people feel if they don't connect with a work of art. But I don't think a work of art can actively reject the person who's looking at it or reading it.
Eleanor Catton
#15. If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own.
Yu Hua
#16. A waterfall cannot be silent, just as the wisdom! When they speak, the voice of power speaks!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#17. The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#18. The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, a general preparation for whatever the student may afterward choose for more particular application. The power of drawing, modeling, and using colors, is very properly called the language of the art.
Joshua Reynolds
#19. I have no illusions that my work can rouse the masses to create change, because literature simply doesn't have that power anymore in my country, if it does anywhere. But I do hope that it can be read by those who are in positions to create change, or that it can at least be part of that dialogue.
Miguel Syjuco
#20. Words in books can remind us of truth, and help awaken us to it. But in themselves, words are just paint and writers are just painters ... Let us not overestimate the power of any form of literature.
David James Duncan
#21. I shall tell you what I believe. I believe God is a librarian. I believe that literature is holy ... it is that best part of our souls that we break off and give each other, and God has a special dispensation for it, angels to guard its making and its preservation.
Sarah Smith
#22. In one sphere above all others, Anne Boleyn still had the power to influence him, and that was in the case of church reform. Anne was a passionate and sincere evangelical, the owner of a library of controversial reformist literature, and she was sympathetic to radical and even Lutheran ideas.
Alison Weir
#23. The public will only stand genius in infintesimal doses,sprinkled with mannerisms and fashionable literature ... A fashionable genius!Doesn't that make you laugh?..what a waste of power!
Romain Rolland
#24. The mind can also be kind and does blot out those episodes of our existence that we can't erase in our consciousness.
F. Sionil Jose
#25. Within a week I walked the streets of Tel-Aviv, I wandered around Budapest and found myself admiring the Architecture of Paris. That's the power of great literature.
Byron Ortiz
#26. Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see.
Zora Neale Hurston
#27. What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.
John Cheever
#28. Let the colours of your ideas are red so that all can easily notice them! And what is red? Red is scream, red is power, red is assertion!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#29. Omnipotence and omniscience are the end of power and knowledge.
Dejan Stojanovic
#30. in his view, literature's worth lies in its power of mystification, in mystification it has its truth; therefore a fake, as the mystification of a mystification, is tantamount to a truth squared. He
Italo Calvino
#31. The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment can manage without them.
Harold Bloom
#32. For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
Matthew Arnold
#33. States of soul rightly expressed, as the poet expresses them in moments of pure inspiration, retain forever the power of creating like states. It is this that makes genuine literature a vital force.
John Lancaster Spalding
#34. Words are instruments, they are tools that, in their different ways, are as effective as any sharp edge or violate chemical. They are, like coins, items of great value, but they represent a currency that, well spent, returns ever greater riches.
Tim Radford
#35. This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.
P.G. Wodehouse
#36. Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.
Bell Hooks
#37. My mother's influence in molding my character was conspicuous. She forced me to learn daily long chapters of the Bible by heart. To that discipline and patient, accurate resolve I owe not only much of my general power of taking pains, but of the best part of my taste for literature.
John Ruskin
#38. 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
#39. The apostles were scattered, and even the leaders of the Church in Jerusalem had neither the power nor the means to impose uniformity.In these circumstances, we must imagine the literature of Christianity as spreading gradually, irregularly, and in a manner which variations inevitable.
Frederic G. Kenyon
#41. The literature of the world has exerted its power by being translated.
Mark Van Doren
#42. I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
Honore De Balzac
#43. ...if you were convinced that the world had forgotten how to think and teach, if you believed it had discarded the beauty of art and literature, if you thought it had crushed the power of truth, would you let that world educate your children?
Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera
#44. The course of English Literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower, she thought.
Harper Lee
#45. Literature is not at the service of the government; on the contrary, governments should do everything in their power to create a favourable climate for literature.
Murong Xuecun
#46. When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature
Tzvetan Todorov
#47. Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.
Alex Tabarrok
#48. ...for most men are unaware that what is in the power of magicians to accomplish, that the heart can also accomplish by dint of love and bravery.
Joseph Bedier
#49. We don't have the choice to control our emotions, but we do have the power to educate our emotions. And we do that through literature and through art and music to give ourselves a repertoire of emotional experiences.
David Brooks
#50. Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion.
Josh McDowell
#51. What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions.
Vincent Buranelli
#52. What surfaced was the surprising power of our cultural heritage.
Patrick Hennessey
#53. Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
#54. The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.
Bernard Bailyn
#55. Sanity
that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
Matthew Arnold
#56. Let fascism find not even a single passage to power or else that poisonous snake will infiltrate into the every vital corner of the country and kill the future of the nation!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#57. Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.
Claire Colebrook
#58. Once I got into college, I discovered literature - in particular, multicultural literature. I just started to understand the power of story and narrative, and you know, like anyone else, I kind of wanted to do it, too.
Matt De La Pena
#59. Human communication and literature are all made of words; thus, it's hard to overestimate their unbelievable power.
Sahara Sanders
#60. The creation by word-power of something out of nothing
what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?
Aldous Huxley
#61. Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can't afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
Alain De Botton
#62. The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#63. Addiction is a very compelling subject for literature - especially now that it's nearly impossible to come out of adult experience without some addiction - to substances, sure, but also to love, sex, success, failure, power.
Porochista Khakpour
#64. Only that type of story deserves to be called moral that shows us that one has the power within oneself to act, out of the conviction that there is something better, even against one's own inclination.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#65. A community united by the ideals of compassion and creativity has incredible power. Art of all kinds
music, literature, traditional arts, visual arts
can lift a community.
Martin O'Malley
#66. Imagine! It is the real power of a book
not what is on the page, but what happens when a reader takes the pages in, makes it part of himself. That is the definition of literature.
Matthew Pearl
#67. There is first the literature of KNOWLEDGE, and secondly, the literature of POWER. The function of the first is
to teach; the function of the second is
to move.
Thomas De Quincey
#68. The study of science, dissociated from that of philosophy and literature, narrows the mind and weakens the power to love and follow the noblest ideals: for the truths which science ignores and must ignore are precisely those which have the deepest bearing on life and conduct.
John Lancaster Spalding
