Quotes About Purpose Of Literature

#1. It is not the purpose of literature to purvey news. For news consult the Almanac de Gotha.

Herman Melville

#2. I call that creativity," Orville said. "The purpose of literature is to teach you how to THINK, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world.

Catherine Lowell

#3. If the purpose of literature is to illuminate human nature, the purpose of fantastic literature is to do that from a wider perspective. You can say different things about what it means to be human if you can contrast that to what it means to be a robot, or an alien, or an elf.

Jo Walton

#4. In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now ?

Dana Gioia

#5. The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

T. S. Eliot

#6. nunna daul Tsuny in the Cherokee language,

Mark Kurlansky

#7. Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

Russell Kirk

#8. 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

#9. Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors.

Plato

#10. He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, who purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood.

Carson McCullers

#11. I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.

Kevin Spacey

#12. Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.

Nadine Gordimer

#13. My one aim and concentrated purpose shall be and is to show that women can learn, can reason, can compete with men in the grand fields of literature and science ...

M. Carey Thomas

#14. Literature is literature. Its purpose is to challenge and disorient us, to break us down a little bit so that we are forced to rebuild ourselves. Over time, over the course of many books, we construct a deeper, truer self.

Mark Slouka

#15. Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

Oscar Wilde

#16. Why should Cornishmen learn Cornish? There is no money in it, it serves no practical purpose, and the literature is scanty and of no great originality or value. The question is a fair one, the answer is simple. Because they are Cornish.

Henry Jenner

#17. It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play - the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life - its facility, its use.

William H Gass

#18. I have an old soul. I don't know any real-life lingo, so I have to take it from movies.

Jennifer Lawrence

#19. The power dynamics in a relationship are going to be fluid over a long period of time, so to wait for 'perfect' is going to be a mistake.

Jason Segel

#20. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.

Thomas Sowell

#21. The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.

Virginia Woolf

#22. Here in Indiana, we run a nationally-recognized program called the Healthy Indiana Plan. The Healthy Indiana Plan offers the uninsured an affordable health care plan with savings accounts that they control.

Mike Pence

#23. You exist in a place that is beyond all rules for me. Do you understand that? - JZB

Karen Marie Moning

#24. 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

#25. For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.

Ama Ata Aidoo

#26. In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.

G.K. Chesterton

#27. 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

#28. I have to believe that literature can effect change; otherwise, I would have no purpose in my life and would have wasted four years on 'Ilustrado.'

Miguel Syjuco

#29. That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community
Chuck Palahniuk in interview with TMO

Chuck Palahniuk

#30. When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi

Faiqa Mansab

#31. Children's books aren't textbooks. Their primary purpose isn't supposed to be "Pick this up and it will teach you this." It's not how literature should be. You probably do learn something from every book you pick up, but it might be simply how to laugh.

J.K. Rowling

#32. Lawmakers zealously guard their prerogatives, and as much as some might oppose a minimum-wage increase, they will not want to see the issue taken out of their hands.

Eric Schneiderman

#33. Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature's mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable.

Muriel Barbery

#34. Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch.

Andrew Napolitano

#35. I'm a visual thinker. Research tells us that only 20 per cent of people think visually. So what about the other 80 per cent? Don't they think in pictures? I mean if you imagine washing and preparing potatoes you visualise the process, right?

Douglas Coupland

#36. What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies.

Gerry Spence

#37. Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.

James Joyce

#38. Samskrit has moulded the minds of our people to the extent to which they themselves are not conscious. Samskrit literature is national in one sense, but its purpose has been universal. That was why it commanded the attention of people who were not followers of a particular culture.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan