Quotes about literature (1154 quotes, page 5)

"I heard him say one time" about being cheated out of the profits of The Man With the Golden Arm film, quoted by Kurt Vonnegut, 1986.
Nonfiction works

“Strabo, traveling in North Africa … [did not find] its women in the army but found that they ruled the country politically, while the men were still without significance in the state, occupying themselves largely with body care and hair-do, greedy for golden jewelry with which to bedeck themselves. The Berbers of our times …. [, ] [n]ear the Atlas Mountains, … have preserved a strong gynocracy. In some Tuareg tribes, the women perpetuate the old culture and know Old Libyan writing and literature. Their men wear veils and remain illiterates.”

Helen Diner (1874–1948) Austrian writer and historian

Mothers and Amazons (trans. 1965 (original 1930s)), p. 137.

Women , Men , Travel , Mountain

“The aim of an information service is to organise the literature on a systematic basis in order to save the time of research workers.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963), p. 4; as cited in: Melanie Feinberg (2007) "Beyond information retrieval"

Time

“I see too many academics forgetting what I think our job is in management, and that is to organize available knowledge; develop new knowledge, of course, but organize it in such a way that it can be useful to practicing managers to underpin management. I am surprised as I watch the literature, that some people are discovering what we’ve known for years. For example, some things like this: that technology affects management organization. I found that out when I was in the airline industry a few years ago and I never thought it was anything very surprising. Another, that the actual managing depends on the situation… I thought, my gosh, there must be something new there. Only to find, after spending a lot of time reading, that there wasn’t anything, and I don’t know any practicing manager who doesn’t manage in light of the situation. I think we have to agree that management theory and science should underpin practice, otherwise why develop it?”

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

Harold Koontz in: Ronald G. Greenwood. Harold Koontz: A Reminiscence Presented at the meetings of the Academy of Management, Boston, August 14, 1984; as cited in Wren & Bedeian (2009;419-420)

People , Way , Knowledge , Thinking

“The existing literature usually stresses the capacity of organizations to learn about and adapt to uncertain, changing environments. We think this emphasis is misplaced. The most important issues about the applicability of evolutionary-ecological theories to organizations concern the timing of changes. Learning and adjusting structure enhance the chance of survival only if the speed of response is commensurate with the temporal patterns of relevant environments.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: Organizational ecology, 1989, p. 70; About structural inertia.

Thinking , Learning , Change , Chance

“In conclusion, we can say that the Indonesian literati had access to all branches of Sanskrit learning and they put these disciplines to the best of use in the emergence of their own creative literature.”

Lokesh Chandra (1927) Indian historian

Sanskrit Studies in Classical Indonesia, by L. Chandra.

Learning

“The current fascination among Muslims with the history of the Crusades, the vast literature on the subject, both academic and popular, and the repeated inferences drawn from the final extinction of the Crusading principalities throw some light on attitudes in this matter. Islam from its inception is a religion of power, and in the Muslim world view it is right and proper that power should be wielded by Muslims and Muslims alone. Others may receive the tolerance, even the benevolence, of the Muslim state, provided that they clearly recognize Muslim supremacy. That Muslims should rule over non-Muslims is right and normal. That non-Muslims should rule over Muslims is an offense against the laws of God and nature, and this is true whether in Kashmir, Palestine, Lebanon, or Cyprus. Here again, it must be recalled that Islam is not conceived as a religion in the limited Western sense but as a community, a loyalty, and a way of life—and that the Islamic community is still recovering from the traumatic era when Muslim governments and empires were overthrown and Muslim peoples forcibly subjected to alien, infidel rule.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Return of Islam (1976)

Life , God , People , World

“A thought that has found a plastic expression must continue to expand in keeping with its own plastic idiom. A plastic idea must be expressed with plastic means just as a musical idea is expressed with musical means, or a literary idea with verbal means. Neither music nor literature are wholly translatable into other art forms; and so a plastic art cannot be created through a superimposed literary meaning. The artist who attempts to do so produces nothing more than a show-booth. He contents himself with visual story-telling. He subjects himself to a mechanistic kind of thinking which disintegrates into fragments.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40-46
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Art , Music , Idea , Thinking

“The climax was reached when the same Marxist professors started explaining away Islamic iconoclasm in terms of what they described as Hindu destruction of Buddhist and Jain places of worship. They have never been able to cite more than half-a-dozen cases of doubtful veracity. A few passages in Sanskrit literature coupled with speculations about some archaeological sites have sufficed for floating the story, sold ad nauseam in the popular press, that Hindus destroyed Buddhist and Jain temples on a large scale. Half-a-dozen have become thousands and then hundreds of thousands in the frenzied imagination suffering from a deep-seated anti-Hindu animus…. And these “facts” have been presented with a large dose of suppressio veri suggestio falsi…. A very late Buddhist book from Sri Lanka accuses Pushyamitra Sunga, a second century B. C. king, of offering prizes to those who brought to him heads of Buddhist monks. This single reference has sufficed for presenting Pushyamitra as the harbinger of a “Brahmanical reaction” which “culminated in the age of the Guptas.” The fact that the famous Buddhist stupas and monasteries at Bharhut and Sanchi were built and thrived under the very nose of Pushyamitra is never mentioned. Nor is the fact that the Gupta kings and queens built and endowed many Buddhist monasteries at Bodh Gaya, Nalanda and Sarnath among many other places. (…) This placing of Hindu kings on par with Muslim invaders in the context of iconoclasm suffers from serious shortcomings. Firstly, it lacks all sense of proportion when it tries to explain away the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jain temples by Islamic invaders in terms of the doubtful destruction of a few Buddhist and Jain shrines by Hindu kings. Secondly, it has yet to produce evidence that Hindus ever had a theology of iconoclasm which made this practice a permanent part of Hinduism. Isolated acts by a few fanatics whom no Hindu historian or pandit has ever admired, cannot explain away a full-fledged theology which inspired Islamic iconoclasm….”

Pushyamitra Shunga King of Sunga Dynasty

S.R. Goel, Some Historical Questions (Indian Express, April 16, 1989), quoted in Shourie, A., & Goel, S. R. (1990). Hindu temples: What happened to them.

Books , Age , Imagination , Sense

“Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Letter to J.B.Sutton, 21 December 1942

Life , Question

“Hawkesworth said of Johnson, "You have a memory that would convict any author of plagiarism in any court of literature in the world."”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Kearsley, 600
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Johnsoniana

World , Memory

“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 (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 172

Soul

“The Culture-Philistine … everywhere meets with educated people of his own sort, and since schools, universities and academies are adapted to his requirements and fashioned on the model corresponding to his cultivation. Since he finds almost everywhere the same tacit conventions with respect to religion, morality and literature, with respect to marriage, the family, the community and the state, he considers it demonstrated that this imposing homogeneity is culture. It never enters his head that this systematic and well-organised philistinism, which is set up in all high places and installed at every editorial desk, is not by any means made culture just because its organs are in concert. It is not even bad culture, says Nietzsche; it is barbarism fortified to the best of its ability, but entirely lacking the freshness and savage force of original barbarism; and he has many graphic expressions to describe Culture-Philistinism as the morass in which all weariness is stuck fast, and in the poisonous mists of which all endeavour languishes.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 8

Marriage , People , Education , School

“In a perfect literature all books should be only a single book, and in such an eternally developing book, the gospel of humanity and culture will be revealed.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Auf eine ähnliche Weise sollen in der vollkommnen Litteratur alle Bücher nur Ein Buch seyn, und in einem solchen ewig werdenden Buche wird das Evangelium der Menschheit und der Bildung offenbart werden.
“Ideas,” Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 95

Books , Perfection

“Here are six popular theses in the philosophical and psychological literature on motivation:1. Motivation is present in the animal kingdom but does not extend throughout it.
2. Motivated beings have a capacity to represent goals and means to goals.
3. A motivation-encompassing attitude may have either a goal or a means as its object.
4. Motivation varies in strength.
5. The stronger an agent’s motivation to A is, in comparison to the agent’s motivation for alternative courses of action, the more likely the agent is to A, other things being equal.
6. Whenever agents act intentionally, there is something they are effectively motivated to do.Divergent conceptions of motivation may be at work in philosophical thought about motivational matters. My concern in this book is a notion of motivation consistent with (among other things) these six claims. Readers who accept all six claims are likely to be more interested in the result than those who do not, but I conjecture that most readers do accept all of these claims, on some reading or other. Also, readers who reject one or more of these theses or who believe that no acceptable conception of motivation is consistent with all of them will be offered good reason to change their minds!”

Alfred Mele (1951) American philosopher

Introduction
Motivation and Agency (2003)

Books , Motivation , Change , Reading

“Although this is less often commented on in the academic literature, democracy is as much about opposition to the arbitrary exercise of power as it is about collective self-government….”

Ian Shapiro (1956) American political theorist

"Democratic Justice" in The Democracy Sourcebook (2003) edited by Robert Dahl, Ian Shapiro, and José Antonio Cheibub.

Exercises , Democracy

“Some old poet's grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and God's own word! Pythagoras says, truly enough, "A true assertion respecting God, is an assertion of God"; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday

God , Truth , Imagination

““Late Shri. Cakyar, was not just a skilled exponent and a capable teacher of Kutiyattam, his wisdom and depth of knowledge made him worthy of the title "Acharya" ”
- Dr. Prem Lata Sharma (noted Hindi writer and scholar of Indian arts and literature), 1994”

Mani Madhava Chakyar (1899–1990) Indian actor

Abhinaya and Netrābhinaya
Source: Nāṭyakalpadruma : Kerala kī Kūṭiyāṭṭam nāṭyakalā kī rūparekhā http://worldcat.org/oclc/44811805&referer=brief_results(Hindi translation), Mani Madhava Chakyar, Dr. Prem Lata Sharma (Ed), Sangeet Natak Akademi New Delhi, 1994

Wisdom , Art , Knowledge , Teachers

“Is this an argument for abolition? Of course it is. But not for an abolition by fiat: for yet another political change that would come as a surprise to the passively governed. It is an invitation to think - are you serious when you say that you cannot imagine life without it? Do you prefer invented tradition, sanitised history, prettified literature, state-sponsored superstition and media-dominated pulses of cheering and jeering?”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

Life , Imagination , History , Thinking

“I don't see why escapist literature should not also be a work of art.”

P. D. James (1920–2014) English crime writer

Time to be Earnest - a Fragment of Biography

Art

“When, as a result of what was called Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the priests had in fact almost entirely lost this function of guidance. Their place was taken by writers and scientists. In both cases it is equally absurd. Mathematics, physics, and biology are as remote from spiritual guidance as the art of arranging words. When that function is usurped by literature and science it proves there is no longer any spiritual life.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

“Morality and literature,” pp. 164-165
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

Life , Art , Mathematics , Science

“Nothing can be more untrue than to pretend that the general religious mind of India has not at all grasped the higher spiritual or metaphysical truths of Indian religion. It is a sheer falsehood or a wilful misunderstanding to say that it has lived always in the externals only of rite and creed and shibboleth. On the contrary, the main metaphysical truths of Indian religious philosophy in their broad idea-aspects or in an intensely poetic and dynamic representation have been stamped on the general mind of the people. The ideas of Maya, Lila, divine Immanence are as familiar to the man in the street and the worshipper in the temple as to the philosopher in his seclusion, the monk in his monastery and the saint in his hermitage. The spiritual reality which they reflect, the profound experience to which they point, has permeated the religion, the literature, the art, even the popular religious songs of a whole people.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Indian Spirituality and Life (1919)

People , Truth , Religion , Art

“…A government as large as the modern megastate cannot conceivably be controlled by a well-informed public, since it is literally impossible to be knowledgeable about even a fraction of the many complex matters modern governments are called upon to govern. … The attraction of free markets … is that they have self-correcting features that place far smaller demands on anyone’s knowledge than democracy does. Each person concerns herself with her own life and the system, supposedly, runs itself. Interpreted in this way, the literature on public ignorance could form the basis of the consequentialist argument the postwar free-market economists sought, but never found … against all government economic intervention: for even if it cannot be shown, on economic grounds, that every intervention hurts more than it helps, it might be shown, on political grounds, that by opening the door to helpful interventions, we begin sliding toward the unhelpful ones on a slope slippery with public ignorance.”

Jeffrey Friedman (political scientist) (1959) American political scientist

Source: “What’s wrong with Libertarianism”, p. 455

Life , Way , Democracy , Knowledge

“India though it has more than five hundred spoken dialects, has only one sacred language and only one sacred literature, accepted and revered by all adherence of Hinduism alike, however diverse in race, dialect, rank and creed. That language is Sanskrit and Sanskrit literature, the only repository of the Veda or knowledge in its widest sense, the only vehicle of Hindu mythology, philosophy, law, the mirror in which all the creeds, opinions, and customs and usages of the Hindus are faithfully reflected and the only quarry whence the requisite materials may be obtained for improving the vernaculars or for expressing important religious and scientific ideas.”

Monier Monier-Williams (1819–1899) Linguist and dictionary compiler

Sir Monier Monier-Williams in: The Literary World: Choice Readings from the Best New Books, with Critical Revisions https://books.google.co.in/books?id=qOoRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA252, James Clarke & Company, 1877, p. 252.

Law , Idea , Knowledge , Sense

“America is today without the necessary information upon which to proceed intelligently. Much of the propaganda essential to winning the war has made the ground look like a battlefield after a tank has passed over it ploughed deep but unfit for culture for some time to come. Nowhere is there a clear authoritative statement of the contribution of the various races as such to America. Nowhere is there, an analysis of what they have brought or can bring, and of all that material which we have not used. Nowhere is there information as to what they take or of what they want most from America. Tons of literature are printed and sent out daily by all kinds of agencies, with seldom a consultation with the foreigner as to how it fits the needs of his race. We ignore in most racial meetings the knowledge which is there outlined, and violate very nearly every sound principle of race psychology. We get as a result the minds of the newcomers but not their hearts; their respectful attention but not their conversion. We get their cash contributions for American war activities and charities, but we do not succeed in creating in them the desire to stay here permanently.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

War , Intelligence , Knowledge , Time

“Mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. So it's never old news to deal with the intersection of human desire and ingenuity. As biohacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and the plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, we explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Interview in 'Kill Screen', 2012 https://killscreen.com/articles/stories-about-orcs-and-rape-man-behind-arse-elektronika/

Science

“I’ve never found anything in occult literature that seemed to have a bearing. You know, the occult—very much like stories of supernatural horror—is a sort of game. Most religions, too. Believe in the game and accept its rules—or the premises of the story—and you can have the thrills or whatever it is you’re after. Accept the spirit world and you can see ghosts and talk to the dear departed. Accept Heaven and you can have the hope of eternal life and the reassurance of an all-powerful god working on your side. Accept Hell and you can have devils and demons, if that’s what you want. Accept—if only for story purposes—witchcraft, druidism, shamanism, magic or some modern variant and you can have werewolves, vampires, elementals. Or believe in the influence and power of a grave, an ancient house or monument, a dead religion, or an old stone with an inscription on it—and you can have inner things of the same general sort. But I’m thinking of the kind of horror—and wonder too, perhaps—that lies beyond any game, that’s bigger than any game, that’s fettered by no rules, conforms to no man-made theology, bows to no charms or protective rituals, that strides the world unseen and strikes without warning where it will, much the same as (though it’s of a different order of existence than all of these) lightning or the plague or the enemy atom bomb. The sort of horror that the whole fabric of civilization was designed to protect us from and make us forget. The horror about which all man’s learning tells us nothing.”

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction

“A Bit of the Dark World” (pp. 261-262); originally published in Fantastic, February 1962
Short Fiction, Night's Black Agents (1947)

Life , God , World , Religion

“If in the nineteenth century most scholars identified the Ghaggar-Hakra's course with the Vedic Sarasvati, it is basically for three reasons. The Rig-Veda, the oldest of the four Vedas, mentions various rivers but praises the Sarasvati above all others: it was a "mighty river" flowing "from the mountain to the sea", and one hymn listed it between the Yamuna and the Sutlej - precisely the location of the Ghaggar-Hakra. Secondly, the local traditions regarding the "lost river" of the Indian desert matched those in the post-Vedic literature (including the Mahabharata), which recorded the gradual disappearance of the Sarasvati. Thirdly, scholars noticed a minor tributary of the Ghaggar called "Sarsuti", an obvious corruption of "Sarasvati": it rises in the Sirmur hills that are part of the Shivaliks and was marked on British maps as early as in 1788. Putting these three lines of evidence together, they concluded that the lost Sarasvati could only have flowed in the Ghaggar's bed.”

Michel Danino (1956) Indian writer

Supporting the claim that Ghaggar-Hakra is the Sarasvati river, as quoted in " Sarasvati: Tracing the death of a river http://www.dnaindia.com/blogs/post-sarasvati-tracing-the-death-of-a-river-1581502" DNA India (12 June 2010)

Mountain , Parting , Sea

“Imagine you are doing a woodworking project, perhaps making a table. Fortunately, you needn't make all the parts yourself. Some are standard sizes and shapes - lengths of two by four, for instance - available at any lumberyard. Some have already been designed and made by other people - drawer pulls and turned legs. All you have to do is fit them into the places you left for them, knowing they were available. You want to make an argument instead of a table. You have created some of the argument yourself, perhaps on the basis of new data or information you have collected. But you needn't invent the whole thing. Other people have worked on your problems or problems related to it, and have made some of the pieces you need. You just have to fit them in where they belong. Like the woodworker, you leave space, when you make your portion of the argument, for the other parts you know you can get. You do that, that is, if you know that they are there to use. And that's one good reason to know the literature: so that you will know the pieces are available and not waste time doing what has already been done.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Writing for Social Scientists (1986), p. 141-142 as cited in: Using the Literature to Formulate your Research Question http://www.utexas.edu/research/pair/usingthe.htm at utexas.edu. Accessed Feb 19, 2013.

People , Imagination , Problem , Time

“There are certain things that are just impressive, aren’t there? One stone can be impressive and the stones around it aren’t. It’s the same with animals. Some, for some reason, are strangely impressive. They just get into you in a strange way. Certain birds obviously have this extra quality that fascinates your attention. Obviously hawks have always done that for me, as a great many others have — not only impressive in themselves but also in that they’ve accumulated an enormous literature making them even more impressive. And crows too. Crows are the central bird in many mythologies. The crow is at every extreme, lives on every piece of land on earth, the most intelligent bird.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

The Paris Review interview

Way , Intelligence , Bird , Animals

“I could best believe that love was some sort of rubbish thought up by the romantic geniuses who were now going to start bellowing like cows, or even dying; at least, there is no mention of love in Njal's Saga, which is nevertheless better than any romantic literature. I had lived for twenty years with the best people in the country, my father and mother, and never heard love mentioned. This couple begat us children, certainly; but not from love; rather, as an element of the simple life of poor people who have no pastimes. On the other hand I had never heard a cross word pass between them all my life—but is that love? I hardly think so. I think love is a pastime amongst sterile folk in towns, and takes the place of the simple life.</b”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Love , Life , Children , People

“More directly related to the NPM is the impressive current literature criticizing it for its sometimes cavalier treatment of the rule of law, especially its free and easy slogans about eliminating red tape and letting managers manage”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

Source: Civil servants and their constitutions, 2002, p. ix

Law

“Use of the term visualization in the cartographic literature can be traced back at least four decades (Philbrick, 1953). It was the 1987 publication of a report by the U. S. National Science Foundation, however, that established a new meaning for this term in the context of scientific research (McCormick et al., 1987). The report, produced by a committee containing no cartographers, emphasized the role of computer display technology in prompting mental visualization - and subsequent insight. Scientific visualization has, thus, been defined as the use of sophisticated computing technology to create visual displays, the goal of which is to facilitate thinking and problem solving. Emphasis is not on storing knowledge but on knowledge construction.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: Exploratory cartographic visualization: advancing the agenda (1997), p. 2

Knowledge , Problem , Thinking , Science

“This is on the basis of the Aryan invasion theory according to which 'Aryans' invaded India in the early second millennium BC, and conquered it from the 'natives'. This theory is based purely on an eighteenth century linguistic proposition, and has no basis either in archaeology, or in literature, or in the racial-ethnic composition of India. What concerns us more, so far as this present volume is concerned, is the attempt to brand Hindu religious texts, on the basis of this theory, as 'invader' texts: a UNESCO publication characterises the Rigveda as 'the epic of the destruction of one of the great cultures of the ancient world.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Shrikant Talageri, The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis, 2000.

World

“The literature on product development continues to grow. This research is varied and vibrant, yet large and fragmented. In this article we first organize the burgeoning product-development literature into three streams of research: product development as rational plan, communication web, and disciplined problem solving. Second, we synthesize research findings into a model of factors affecting the success of product development. This model highlights the distinction between process performance and product effectiveness and the importance of agents, including team members, project leaders, senior management, customers, and suppliers, whose behavior affects these outcomes. Third, we indicate potential paths for future research based on the concepts and links that are missing or not well defined in the model.”

Shona Brown (1960) businessperson

Source: "Product development" , 1995, p. 343; Abstract

Behavior , Communication , Problem , Success

“"Hypertext is a representation of the text which escapes and surprises by turns," I wrote. Given the pure unaccountability (it is literally impossible to read all the possible variations of a richly linked hypertext) a hyperfiction writer is always attuned to "how the reader will interpret the literature presented" since its presentation shifts and flows in its composition as well.”

Michael Joyce (1945) American academic and writer

Interview with Michael Joyce in Pif (January 2000)

Reading

“America is no longer afraid of the word culture. In fact, it is considering quite seriously in some quarters having a culture of its own and calling it by that name. This makes it possible to consider as Americanization a recognition of the cultural forces in the various races as expressed in their literature and institutions. There is a growing appreciation of the fraternal and religious forces in the lives of the various races and their indispensable value in race fusion. In the old world, the cultural life of a race is so inextricably associated with their religious life that its first vital contact with American cultural life would seem to proceed along the lines of religious and fraternal development.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life , World

“Our National life is full of diversities. We have here a variety of languages, of faiths, of communities, of modes of living, and schools and styles of literature and art. This diversity reflects the abundance of our national life, and need to be preserved and promoted.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–2018) 10th Prime Minister of India

Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha Session, Indore – September, 7-8, 1968
Quotes from ataljee.org

Life , School , Faith , Art

“It is irrelevant in that ethnies arc constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i. e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population. In that sense much has been retained, and revived, from the extant heritage of ancient Greece. For, even at the time of Slavic migrations, in Ionia and especially in Constantinople, there was a growing emphasis on the Greek language, on Greek philosophy and literature, and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such a ‘Greek revival’ was to surface again in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as subsequently, providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage. This is not to deny for one moment either the enormous cultural changes undergone by the Greeks despite a surviving sense of common ethnicity or the cultural influence of surrounding peoples and civilizations over two thousand years. At the same time in terms of script and language, certain values, a particular environment and its nostalgia, continuous social interactions and a sense of religious and cultural difference, even exclusion, a sense of Greek identity and common sentiments of ethnicity can be said to have persisted”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 30: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

People , Sense , Nostalgia , Memory

“It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave.”

Anatole Broyard (1920–1990) American literary critic

New York Times 16th March 1973.

Love , Nostalgia , Waiting

“The human mind is [a poet's] individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our [the readers'] minds too. There is no self-expression in [a poet's] poem, because once the poem is there the individual [poet] has disappeared. …there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

“The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

Milton's God (1961; repr. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965) p. 261.
Other

People , Imagination

“I used to think I could understand everything and express everything. Or almost everything. I remember when I was writing my book about the war in Afghanistan, Zinky Boys, I went to Afghanistan and they showed me some of the foreign weapons that had been captured from the Afghan fighters. I was amazed at how perfect their forms were, how perfectly a human thought had been expressed. There was an officer standing next to me and he said, "If someone were to step on this Italian mine that you say is so pretty it looks like a Christmas decoration, there would be nothing left of them but a bucket of meat. You'd have to scrape them off the ground with a spoon." When I sat down to write this, it was the first time I thought, "Is this something I should say?" I had been raised on great Russian literature, I thought you could go very very far, and so I wrote about that meat. But the Zone—it's a separate world, a world within the rest of the world—and it's more powerful than anything literature has to say.”

Svetlana Alexievich book Voices from Chernobyl

Source: Voices from Chernobyl (2005), pp. 239–240

War , Books , World , Boy

“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 (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

"Preface to Poems" (1854)

“The so-called obscurity of modernist literature has, of course, a lot to do with the new stress on exegesis. When the overt meaning of a work can no longer be taken for granted, criticism is forced — or seems forced — to undertake the explication of the text of the work before doing anything else. But experience has shown us by now that the drift and shape of an "obscure" poem or novel can be grasped for the purposes of art without being "worked out." Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

"T.S. Eliot: A Book Review" (1950/1956), p. 244
1960s, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (1961)

Art , Success , Parting , Dependency

“The movement nowadays called fundamentalism is not the only Islamic tradition. There are others, more tolerant, more open, that helped to inspire the great achievements of Islamic civilization in the past, and we may hope that these other traditions will in time prevail. But before this issue is decided there will be a hard struggle, in which we of the West can do little or nothing. Even the attempt might do harm, for these are issues that Muslims must decide among themselves. And in the meantime we must take great care on all sides to avoid the danger of a new era of religious wars, arising from the exacerbation of differences and the revival of ancient prejudices.
To this end we must strive to achieve a better appreciation of other religious and political cultures, through the study of their history, their literature, and their achievements. At the same time, we may hope that they will try to achieve a better understanding of ours, and especially that they will understand and respect, even if they do not choose to adopt for themselves, our Western perception of the proper relationship between religion and politics.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

War , Religion , Hope , History

“Literature is no longer Necessary Teaching is left.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Some of the Dharma (1997)

“The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html

Question , Problem , Thinking

“Poets like Jayasi, Rahim, and Raskhan are rare phenomena. So are saints like Kabir, Nanak and Gharib Das. They attempted a synthesis of the two cultural streams in the field of literature in their own way. But their endeavours were severly limited and short-lived. They failed to be popular amongst and influence the Muslims.”

Harsh Narain (1921–1995) Indian writer

Harsh Narain, Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions, 1990, p.27
Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions (1990)

Way

“I’m very skeptical in approaching Bach as a clean slate. To understand Bach, one has to be at home in the whole literature of art and interpretation; one must have great experience in performing the complete literature, from Bach until the early avantgarde. I’m absolutely convinced that only by this deep knowledge one can feel the all-embracing range of effects that are compressed in Bach and his music - and how later generations have been inspired. Only by this experience you can give the Bach interpretation a new balance and tension. In the case of the Goldberg Variations we are confronted with these all-emotional effects, and I’m also skeptical whether this all-embracing range can be touched by much too young players, on harpsichord as well as on piano. Knowing the true worth of this condensed and nearly welded-in polyphonic structure and singular musical architecture, one ultimately knows that it is impossible to play with the variations, meaning to change voices, or make doublings. Then the music itself would be robbed of its true worth and sense, which can only be revealed by bringing out the embedded simplicity, which however is transformed to an electrified, heated atmosphere. One has to respect the internal strength.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Art , Music , Feeling , Home

“Photography is not an art. Neither is painting, nor sculpture, literature or music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings... You do not have to be a painter or a sculptor to be an artist. You may be a shoemaker. You may be creative as such. And, if so, you are a greater artist than the majority of the painters whose work is shown in the art galleries of today.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

'Is Photography a Failure?', Alfred Stieglitz, 'Sun: 5.', March 14, 1922; as quoted on Wikipedia

Art , Music , Feeling , Painting

“Of course, there is drawing in art as there is style in literature. Style that is mannered, that strains after effect, is bad. No style is good except that which effaces itself in order to concentrate all the attention of the reader upon the subject treated, upon the emotion rendered.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. V. Drawing and Color, p. 96

Art , Drawing

“Bruzundanga's literature is ruled by cute, rhyming and tasteless sonnets.”

Lima Barreto book Os Bruzundangas

Os Bruzundangas (1923)

“To Donham, the case study stood squarely in the legal and cultural tradition of Anglo-American thought. Unlike French or Spanish law. Donham emphasized, English law was grounded on the doctrine of stare decisis, in which the written case decisions of the past shape, and instantiate, the law. Just as the recording of cases allowed English common law to break the arbitrariness of local law. Donham argued in 1925, business needed to universalize its procedures by itself adopting the case system. The chaos of local law that ruled in England before the common law. Donham contended, "is exactly the same situation that we have [in the world of business] where practically every large corporation is tightly hound by traditions which are precedents in its particular narrow field and narrow held only The recording of decisions from industry to industry [enables] us to start from facts and draw inferences from those facts; [it] will introduce principle… in the field of business to such an extent that it will control executive action in the field where executive action is haphazard or unprincipled or bound by narrow, instead of broad precedent and decision"”

Peter Galison (1955) American physicist

W. Donham, transcript of talk to the Association of Coll. School of Business Committee Reports and Other Literature, 5-7 May 1925. Harvard Business School, box 17, folder 10. 62
Source: Image and Logic, 1997, p. 57, footnote 66

World , School , Law , Business

“The image of the whole of Bharatavarsha being a chakravartikshetra is as old as the oldest Vedic literature. The Itihasa-Purana provide glorious accounts of many chakravartins-Ikshvaku, Puru, Prithu Vainya, Sivi Ausinara, Mandhata, Raghu and so on-who accompanied the ašvamedha horse demanding submission from all kingdoms and republics, big and small, spread all over the country. The rãjasûya yajña which was performed at the end of this campaign was more in the nature of a meeting of equals than a durbar held by a despot in order to humble or humiliate subordinate princes and patriarchs. Sri Krishna had demanded death for Jarasandha because the latter had violated this dharmic tradition of empire-building, and kept a hundred kings captive in his castle. The Nandas had won notoriety as an ignoble dynasty because they had also violated the standard code of conduct laid down by the rãjadharma for righteous emperors, destroyed many local dynasties, and reduced other princes to provincial satraps.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Death , Nature , Horse , Country

“Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957)
Judicial opinions

“I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Interview with Paul Newman in Abraxas Unbound #7

“And I go to my room and stretch out my arms to the West—that it is far away [from here], that I will someday return. Outside those painful sensations—it is horrible to be before these people and their lives. Service and family troubles -a hard beginning, pay raise, promotion - sweet dreams, scandal - daily bread, [This is a figurative reference to Our Lord's Prayer, "give us this day our daily bread.."] and their happiness reminds me sweetly, of those who buy "for the people," and whose food you wouldn't put in your mouth. I think of Munich and of my health. All that is here is suffering and this horror of beauty and this horrible life and this overbearing literature, and the complete superfluousness of art.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

1906 - 1911
Source: a letter to Alexej von Jawlensky, between December 1909 and Spring 1910; as quoted in 'Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home, c. 1909', Adrienne Kochman http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring06/52-spring06/spring06article/171-ambiguity-of-home-identity-and-reminiscence-in-marianne-werefkins-return-home-c-1909

Life , Pain , People , Health

“At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

John Keats Letter to George and Thomas Keats

Letter to George and Thomas Keats (December 22, 1817)
Letters (1817–1820)

“We are honored for research which is today referred to as the "Two Neutrino Experiment". How does one make this research comprehensible to ordinary people? In fact "The Two Neutrinos" sounds like an Italian dance team. How can we have our colleagues in chemistry, medicine, and especially in literature share with us, not the cleverness of our research, but the beauty of the intellectual edifice, of which our experiment is but one brick? This is a dilemma and an anguish for all scientists because the public understanding of science is no longer a luxury of cultural engagement, but it is an essential requirement for survival in our increasingly technological age: In this context, I believe this Nobel Ceremony with its awesome tradition and pomp has as one of its most important benefits; the public attention it draws to science and its practitioners.”

Leon M. Lederman (1922–2018) American mathematician and physicist

Lederman's speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1988 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1988/lederman-speech.html (URL accessed on October 20, 2008)

People , Age , Beauty , Understanding

“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (p. 33)

Fate , People , Pleasure , Youth

“I believe that shortly after LSD was discovered, it was recognized as being of great value to psychoanalysis and psychiatry. It was not considered to be an escape. It was a very important discovery at that time, and for fifteen years it could be used legally in psychiatric treatment and for scientific study in humans. During this time, Delysid, the name I gave to LSD, was used safely, and was the subject of thousands of publications in the professional literature. Actually, just last week, I had visitors from the Albert Hofmann Foundation, to whom I gave all of the original documentation, which had been stored at the Sandoz Laboratories. This early work was very well documented, and shows how well research with LSD went until it became part of the drug scene in the 1960s. So, from originally being part of the therapeutic pharmacopeia, LSD became a drug of the street and inevitably it was made illegal. Because of this reputation, it became unavailable to the medical field, and so the research, which had been very open, was stopped. Now it appears that this research may start again. The importance of such investigations appears to be recognized by the health authorities, and so it is my hope that finally the prohibition is coming to an end, and the medical field can return to the explorations which were forced to stop thirty years ago.”

Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) Swiss chemist

MAPS interview (1998)

Health , Hope , Study , Appearance

“Quantum fiction is literature that embodies the new physical or quantum universe.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview (2007)

Universe

“I saw no reason why you couldn't create a work of pornography that adhered to all the same standards as the best art or literature. The big difference between art and pornography is that art, at its best, makes you feel less alone. You see a painting or read a piece of writing that expresses a thought that you had but didn't express, and you suddenly feel less alone. Pornography, on the other hand, tends to engender feelings of self-disgust, isolation and wretchedness. I wanted to change that.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/alan-moore-the-reluctant-hero-64407.html

Art , Feeling , Change , Reading

“A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Thursday

“Historians of the future will amuse themselves by coming up with theories to explain why European civilization, at the height of its powers, rich with unparalleled achievements in science, music, art, literature, mathematics, and technology, gave up its lands and its treasures to people for whom those achievements were mere hated tokens of oppression or the impious and superfluous productions of infidels.”

John Derbyshire (1945) writer

Multiculturalism: When Will the Sleeper Wake? http://takimag.com/article/multiculturalism_when_will_the_sleeper_wake_john_derbyshire/print#ixzz3xOopVxdb, Taki's Magazine, March 29, 2012.

Hate , People , Art , Music

“Depersonalization is a concept difficult to delineate. It can be regarded as a symptom or as a loosely associated group of symptoms that occurs in psychiatric patients. It can be induced experimentally and also occurs spontaneously in normal subjects. A major obstacle to clearer definition of this concept lies in the fact that it refers to exceedingly private events in the individual's experience. These prove very difficult to describe by a language geared to the description of public (consensually validated) events or private events, such as pain, that occur usually in clearly defined social settings. When it comes to describing and conveying something as ineffable as depersonalization or derealization, the subject resorts to metaphors, "as if" expressions, and figures of speech. The result is semantic confusion. Different authors mean different things when they use the term depersonalization.
The concept of depersonalization merges by imperceptible degrees with the concept derealization, the concept of altered body image and self, deja vu, jamais vu, altered time and space perception and so on - the whole gamut of phenomenological description of the experiences of mental patients. Therefore, it is rather difficult to evaluate and to review objectively the psychiatric literature on the phenomena of depersonalization.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Depersonalization, (1970), p. 171

Pain , Time

“There is no. man, there is no people, without a God. That God may be a visible idol, carved of wood or stone, to which sacrifice is offered in the forest, in the temple, or in the market-place; or it may be an invisible idol, fashioned in a man's own image and worshipped ardently at his own personal shrine. Somewhere in the universe there is that in which each individual has firm faith, and on which he places steady reliance. The fool who says in his heart "There is no God" really means there is no God but himself. His supreme egotism, his colossal vanity, have placed him at the center of the universe which is thereafter to be measured and dealt with in terms of his personal satisfactions. So it has come to pass that after nearly two thousand years much of the world resembles the Athens of St. Paul's time, in that it is wholly given to idolatry; but in the modern case there are as many idols as idol worshippers, and every such idol worshipper finds his idol in the looking-glass. The time has come once again to repeat and to expound in thunderous tones the noble sermon of St. Paul on Mars Hill, and to declare to these modern idolaters "Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you."
There can be no cure for the world's ills and no abatement of the world's discontents until faith and the rule of everlasting principle are again restored and made supreme in the life of men and of nations. These millions of man-made gods, these myriads of personal idols, must be broken up and destroyed, and the heart and mind of man brought back to a comprehension of the real meaning of faith and its place in life. This cannot be done by exhortation or by preaching alone. It must be done also by teaching; careful, systematic, rational teaching, that will show in a simple language which the uninstructed can understand what are the essentials of a permanent and lofty morality, of a stable and just social order, and of a secure and sublime religious faith.
Here we come upon the whole great problem of national education, its successes and its disappointments, its achievements and its problems yet unsolved. Education is not merely instruction far from it. It is the leading of the youth out into a comprehension of his environment, that, comprehending, he may so act and so conduct himself as to leave the world better and happier for his having lived in it. This environment is not by any means a material thing alone. It is material of course, but, in addition, it is intellectual, it is spiritual. The youth who is led to an understanding of nature and of economics and left blind and deaf to the appeals of literature, of art, of morals and of religion, has been shown but a part of that great environment which is his inheritance as a human being. The school and the college do much, but the school and the college cannot do all. Since Protestantism broke up the solidarity of the ecclesiastical organization in the western world, and since democracy made intermingling of state and church impossible, it has been necessary, if religion is to be saved for men, that the family and the church do their vital cooperative part in a national organization of educational effort. The school, the family and the church are three cooperating educational agencies, each of which has its weight of responsibility to bear. If the family be weakened in respect of its moral and spiritual basis, or if the church be neglectful of its obligation to offer systematic, continuous and convincing religious instruction to the young who are within its sphere of influence, there can be no hope for a Christian education or for the powerful perpetuation of the Christian faith in the minds and lives of the next generation and those immediately to follow. We are trustees of a great inheritance. If we abuse or neglect that trust we are responsible before Almighty God for the infinite damage that will be done in the life of individuals and of nations…. Clear thinking will distinguish between men's different associations, and it will be able to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and to render unto God the things which are God's.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Making liberal men and women : public criticism of present-day education, the new paganism, the university, politics and religion https://archive.org/stream/makingliberalmen00butluoft/makingliberalmen00butluoft_djvu.txt (1921)

Life , Men , God , People

“At the 2008 Lambda Literary Awards (the awards the LGBT community gives to books ignored by straight book awards) not a single lesbian book nominated for best novel was published by a mainstream press. Our literature is disappearing at the same time we are being told we are winning our rights. How can we be equal citizens if our stories are not allowed to be part of our nation's story?”

Sarah Schulman (1958) American writer

Source: The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), p. 151

Books , Communication , Time , Parting

“My roster of the new literature, in short, would include all the writers who come bearing new information and who present it with vigor, clarity and humanity.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 9, Nonfiction as Literature, p. 61.

“Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature.”

James Tiptree, Jr (1915–1987) American science fiction writer

Letter quoted in "James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" (2006) by Julie Phillips

“The phrase "a literature of decadence" implies a scale of literature: infancy, childhood, adolescence, etc. This term, I would say, supposes something fateful and providential, like an inescapable decree; and it is completely unjust to reproach us for the fulfillment of a law that is mysterious. All I can understand of this academic saying is that it is shameful to obey this law pleasurably, and that we are guilty of rejoicing in our destiny.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Le mot littérature de décadence implique qu'il y a une échelle de littératures, une vagissante, une puérile, une adolescente, etc. Ce terme, veux-je dire, suppose quelque chose de fatal et de providentiel, comme un décret inéluctable; et il est tout à fait injuste de nous reprocher d'accomplir la loi mystérieuse. Tout ce que je puis comprendre dans la parole académique, c'est qu'il est honteux d'obéir à cette loi avec plaisir, et que nous sommes coupables de nous réjouir dans notre destinée.
XI: "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," I http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Edgar_Poe_III._Notes_nouvelles_sur_Edgar_Poe_%28L%E2%80%99Art_romantique%29#I
L'art romantique (1869)

Fate , Pleasure , Law , Understanding

“When Henry Mulcahy, a middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President's letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer.”

Mary McCarthy book The Groves of Academe

Source: The Groves of Academe (1952), Ch. I, p. 293, first lines of novel

Age , Cry

“I just wanted to say something about (…) my resentment of the identification of this country of Britain with royalty. As if we have nothing else to offer as a culture – the country of my birth. The great contribution, of the English anyway, to the world is literature and language. That language and literature is, in fact, in its tradition quite extensively republican and democratic. I mean our Blake, Milton, our Shelley, many many other great writers, poetry and prose, have been against the idea that Britain is a feudal or monarchic system. One of the great aspects of that tradition is represented by the name Thomas Paine, who is the moral author of your Declaration of Independence. In fact, one of the great accomplishments of the English republican movement, if you like, is the American Declaration of Independence. So it has always struck me as rather bizarre that there is this cult in the United States of English royalism – just the sort of thing I left England to get away from.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1997-05-09
Christopher Hitchens on Diana, Princess of Wales, the Royal Family, Dodi Fayed & Muslim Law (1997)
C-SPAN
Washington, D.C.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQK2d1TdTzk
1990s

Pain , World , Idea , Birth

“It is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in Literature or Art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both.”

George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) British philosopher

The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)

Art

“A first proposition, therefore, in Americanization is to find a way to satisfy the creative instinct in men and their sense of home, by giving them and their native-born sons the widest possible knowledge of America, including a pictorial geography, a simple history of the United States, the stories of successful Americans including those of foreign-born origin; a knowledge of American literature, of our political ideals and institutions, and of oiy: free educational opportunities. A systematic effort should be made to give them a land interest and a home stake and to get them close to the soil, not alone in the day's work but also in their cultural life. The men most likely to desert America at the close of the war will be workers with job stakes and wage rates, and not those with a home stake and investments. I would carry this campaign of information into every foreign language publication, every newspaper, every shop, and every racial center in America. The land interpreter of the future will be the government, and Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, has foreseen this in his appeal for the use of the land for the rehabilitation of men returning from the front. It is the land that will make the life of the maimed livable and will connect the past with the future. This will not be achieved by forced "back-to-the-land movements" and colonization. Each individual American who interprets the beauty of America and its meaning, and who, wherever he can, personally puts the foreign-born in touch with the soil and helps him to a plot of ground which he can call his own, is doing effective Americanization. Loyalty and efficiency are inherent in this land sense, and they are the strength of a nation.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life , Men , War , Education

“As intelligent life that can impact a comet with total precision, send missions to Mars, and create beauty, art, dance, literature, and music, the greatest sex organ is the mind and my guess is there are orgasms awaiting us like none we have known before, provided we get there.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Vanna Bonta Talks Sex in Space (Interview - Femail magazine)

Life , Beauty , Art , Music

“That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvellous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable….”

Jorge Luis Borges book Ficciones

"Theme of the Traitor and Hero"
Ficciones (1944)

History

“E-literature is certainly a broader concept than e-poetry, but it can also be limiting: like Verlaine in a famous line from his Art Poétique, one might conclude: et tout le reste est e-littérature, to emphasize the imponderable specificity of poetry.”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

Source: Virtual Mercury House. Planetary & Interplanetary Events, p. 128

Art

“I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 46

Thinking

“So many people’s school experience contains at least one instance of being looked down upon because they didn’t care for one or more of the sacred mutant outcroppings of High Modernism, and they concluded from this that Literature is all about impenetrable stuff that they don’t like. That damn Hemingway with his crazy free verse.”

Patrick Nielsen Hayden (1959) American science fiction editor, fanzine publisher, essayist, reviewer, anthologist, and teacher

Oh No Lev Grossman No http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011593.html, in Making Light (30 August 2009)]

People , School

“The world of their [the bourgeois’] predecessors was a backward, pre-technological world, a world with the good conscience of inequality and toil, in which labor was still a fated misfortune; but a world in which man and nature were not yet organized as things and instrumentalities. With its code of forms and manners. with the style and vocabulary of its literature and philosophy. this past culture expressed the rhythm and content of a universe in which valleys and forests, villages and inns, nobles and villains, salons and courts were a part of the experienced reality. In the verse and prose of this pre-technological culture is the rhythm of those who wander or ride in carriages. who have the time and the pleasure to think, contemplate, feel and narrate. It is an outdated and surpassed culture, and only dreams and childlike regressions can recapture it. But this culture is, in some of its decisive elements. also a post-technological one. Its most advanced images and positions seem to survive their absorption into administered comforts and stimuli; they continue to haunt the consciousness with the possibility of their rebirth in the consummation of technical progress. They are the expression of that free and conscious alienation from the established forms of life with which literature and the arts opposed these forms even where they adorned them. In contrast to the Marxian concept, which denotes man's relation to himself and to his work in capitalist society, the artistic alienation is the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence—a “higher level” or mediated alienation. The conflict with the world of progress, the negation of the order of business, the anti-bourgeois elements in bourgeois literature and art are neither due to the aesthetic lowliness of this order nor to romantic reaction—nostalgic consecration of a disappearing stage of civilization. “Romantic” is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term “decadent” far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth. What they recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 59-60

Life , Fate , Pleasure , Truth

“No refining of one's taste in matters of art or literature, no sharpening of one's powers of insight in matters of science or psychology, can ever take the place of one's sensitiveness to the life of the earth. This is the beginning and the end of a person's true education.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

Source: The Meaning of Culture (1929), p. 175

Life , Education , Art , Science

“The people of China forged their own literature apart from letters. And today this is what lives, to be part of what is to come, and all the formal literature, which was called art, is dead. The plots of these novels are often incomplete, the love interest is often not brought to solution, heroines are often not beautiful and heroes often are not brave. Nor has the story always an end; sometimes it merely stops, in the way life does, in the middle of it when death is not expected.
In this tradition of the novel have I been born and reared as a writer.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

Love , Life , Death , People

“If Catholic literature has a central theme, it is the difficult journey of the sinner toward redemption”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

14
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

“While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 52

“A very remarkable work… in the present state of light literature in England, a novel that actually tells a story. It 's quite incredible, I know. Try the book. It has another extraordinary merit, it isn't written by a woman.”

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) British writer

The Works of Wilkie Collins: The Black Robe [P.F. Collier, 1900] (p. 328)
Also in Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life by Graham Law & Andrew Maunder [Springer, 2008, ISBN 0-230-22750-3] ( p. 15 https://books.google.com/books?id=kKyHDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA15&f=false)

Books , Light

“To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, p. 265
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Housing

“Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

Letter to Charlotte Brontë in March 1837, reported in Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë, Vol. I (1857), p. 139, and in Mumby Letters of Literary Men, Vol. II (1906), p. 185.

Life , Business