Quotes About Universal Literature

#1. Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.

Jose Saramago

#2. It's very difficult to balance different audiences and talk to each one without selling the others short. There is no universal literature - or, if there is, I don't know how to write it.

G. Willow Wilson

#3. The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant.

Ismail Kadare

#4. Children's books do not exist in a vacuum, unrelated to literature as a whole. They are a portion of universal literature and must be subjected to the same standards of criticism as any other form of literature.

Lillian H. Smith

#5. With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.

Shawn Johnson

#6. Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity.

Carl Sagan

#7. One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!"
And a little later you added:
"You know
one loves the sunset, when one is so sad ... "
"Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?"
But the little prince made no reply.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#8. History will be erased in the universal purgatory.

Dejan Stojanovic

#9. To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.

George Bernard Shaw

#10. The reading of the ancients awakened new delight in the melody and beauty of language: men became intoxicated with words. The practice of rhetoric was universal and it quickly coloured all literature. It

George Herbert Mair

#11. In order to have a literature, a nation must live, not merely on the practical, but on the moral and spiritual plane as well, contributing through its national life to the development of some side of the universal spirit of man.

Vissarion Belinsky

#12. Surprises, I feel now, are primarily a form of violence.

Suzanne Finnamore

#13. 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

#14. It's such a relief to know these are universal truths for so many of us in the adoption triad. Gosh, how much easier things could have been for you, for me, and your folks, if literature like this had been around, say, five, ten years ago, when we could've all really used it.

Paula Gruben

#15. Universal appreciation of art ... belongs to those countries and those ages which are not, or were not, ruled by materialism. Though travel was never so easy, literature on art never so profuse, and works of art never so widely distributed, a real passion for pictures is encountered but rarely.

Walter J. Phillips

#16. The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.

Whitley Strieber

#17. Literature endures like the universal spirit,
And its breath becomes a part of the vitals of all men.

Li Shang-yin

#18. In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.

Lytton Strachey

#19. I kept thinking, 'How do you make a modern musical?' Then it became clear that I could do it just like a small indie art-house movie, very naturalistically. I could create a world where it's o.k. to break into song, without an orchestra coming up out of nowhere.

John Carney

#20. I haven't mastered the art of sitting and smiling.

Ashley Wagner

#21. Every culture has contributed to maths just as it has contributed to literature. It's a universal language; numbers belong to everyone.

Daniel Tammet

#22. I am a person always full of contradictions ... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.

Ba Jin

#23. That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#24. 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

#25. You can't escape from what you are.

Vincent Cassel

#26. I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

C. G. Jung

#27. We're supposed to see "universal" love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature.

Audre Lorde

#28. She has her fingers curled tightly around his forefinger and I have hold of her perfect pink foot, and I feel as though fireworks are going off in my chest. It's impossible, this much love.

Paula Hawkins

#29. It is not my intention to explain Turkey, its culture and its problems. My literature has a universal concern: I want to bring people and their emotions closer to my readers, not explain Turkish politics.

Orhan Pamuk