Quotes about literature (1152 quotes, page 9)

“The editor of this selection from Chopin’s Pianoforte Studies has, however, no such intention; on the contrary. he wishes to make some of them, which owing to their difficulty have hitherto remained unpopularised, more accessible, particularly to the amateur, by pointing out the way to their correct study. And thus, on the basis of the technical facility to be acquired through these pieces, to enable even the non-professional to enjoy a more intimate acquaintance with those works of the classical romanticist, which, though representing the best and most undying side of his genius, have found till now but a small, though daily increasing circle of admirers; for the “Ladies’-Chopin”, which for forty years has blossomed in the pale and sickly rays of dilettantism; the “talented, languishing, Polish youth” to whom the most modest place on the Parnassus of musical literature was denied by the amateurish criticism of German professors, is as little the genuine entire Chopin, as is the Beethoven of “Adelaide” and the “Moonlight Sonata”, the god of Symphony. Truly a span of time must yet elapse before the matured and manly Chopin, the author of the two Sonatas, the 3rd and 4th Scherzos, the 4th Ballade, the Polonaise in F# minor, the later Mazurkas and Nocturnes etc., will be completely and generally appreciated at his full worth. At the same time much may be done by preparing and clearing the way; and one of the best means towards this end is sifting the material, and replacing favourite and unimportant works, by those less known though more important.”

Hans von Bülow (1830–1894) German musician

Preface to Instructive ausgabe. Klavier-Etuden von Fr. Chopin, 1880.

God , Youth , Music , Way

“I personally regret the shift in literary study from reading primary texts to reading critical and theoretical texts. The major problem today among students is that they simply have not read enough literature. Consequently they do not have the necessary background to take a critical attitude towards literary theory. One needs to test every abstraction against experience.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Interview with Robert McPhillips http://www.danagioia.net/about/mcphillips.htm (December 1991), published in Verse (Summer 1992)
Interviews

Problem , Study , Reading , Personality

“Wallace's error on human intellect arose from the inadequacy of his rigid selectionism, not from a failure to apply it. And his argument repays our study today, since its flaw persists as the weak link in many of the most “modern” evolutionary speculations of our current literature. For Wallace's rigid selectionism is much closer than Darwin's pluralism to the attitude embodied in our favored theory today, which, ironically in this context, goes by the name of “Neo-Darwinism.””

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace", p. 54
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Error , Failure , Study

“What I have to express is not handled with words. It must 'come' tot the observer. It must carry its influence over the mind of the individual into that region of him which is more than the mind. The pictures must reach inwards into the deeper experiences of the beholder – and mind you they care in no sense religious tracts – there is no story to them or literature – no morals – they are merely artistic expressions of mystical states – these in themselves being my own personal motives as drawn from either special experiences or aggregate ones.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

letter to Alfred Stieglitz, September 28, 1913, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 9
1908 - 1920

Motivation , Sense , Personality

“It is curious to observe what different ideals of happiness people cherish, and in what singular places they look for this well-spring of their life. Many look for it in the hoarding of riches, some in the pride of power, and others in the achievements of art and literature; a few seek it in the exploration of their own minds, or in search for knowledge.”

Helen Keller book Optimism

Optimism (1903)

Life , People , Art , Search

“Despite the fact that our profession constantly urges others to “consult the literature”, I do not think we are distinguished nowadays by knowledge of our heritage.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Vickery (1998) "The Royal Society scientific information conference of 1948." Journal of Documentation, 54(3), p. 283; As cited in: Vanda Broughton (2011) " Brian Vickery and the Classification Research Group: the legacy of faceted classification http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/papers/broughton.pdf".

Knowledge , Thinking

“These three classes of problems—determination of significant fact, matching of facts with theory, and articulation of theory—exhaust, I think, the literature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical. They do not, of course, quite exhaust the entire literature of science. There are also extraordinary problems, and it may well be their resolution that makes the scientific enterprise as a whole so particularly worthwhile. But extraordinary problems are not to be had for the asking. They emerge only on special occasions prepared by the advance of normal research.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), III. The Nature of Normal Science, p. 34 (2012 ed.)

Problem , Thinking , Science

“We are all familiar with the passionate and closely argued appeal against censorship by the outstanding Soviet writer A. Solzhenitsyn. He as well as G. Vladimov, G. Svirsky, and other writers who have spoken out on the subject have clearly shown how incompetent censorship destroys the living soul of Soviet literature, but the same applies of course to all other manifestations of social thought, causing stagnation and dullness and preventing fresh and deep ideas.
Such ideas, after all, can arise only in discussion, in the face of objections, only if there is a potential possibility of expressing not only true but also dubious ideas. This was clear to the philosophers of ancient Greece and hardly anyone nowadays would have any doubts on that score. But after fifty years of complete domination over the minds of an entire nation, our leaders seem to fear even allusions to such a discussion.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, The Threat to Intellectual Freedom

Fear , Soul , Idea , Passion

“Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

The Hindu (26 February 1995)

Truth , Hope , Imagination , Heart

“William Shakespeare has probably done more to damage the cultural worth of Britain than anyone else in the whole of human history. After endlessly having to study his plays on the school curriculum, generations of children have ventured into adulthood convinced that all literature is coma-inducingly dreary. I don't blame them. Portia's speech about the 'gentle rain' is in no way as stimulating as 10 minutes of Grand Theft Auto. I believe that Shakespeare, along with Milton, Donne and Chaucer, has a place in modern Britain. And that place is deep in the bowels of the British Library, where he can be studied by hardcore language students.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

Source: For Crying Out Loud! The World According to Clarkson Volume Three (2008), p. 21

Children , School , Way , History

“Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

From a speech entitled Come September http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/politics/comeSeptember.pdf.
Speeches

“We have a tendency to romanticize independence. Most business literature still views autonomy as a virtue, as though communication, teamwork, and cooperation were lesser values.”

Keith Ferrazzi (1966) American businessman and writer

Never Eat Alone

Communication , Business

“Comics they say are not literature – adventure strips lack artistic form, mental substance, and emotional appeal to any but the most moronic of minds. Can it be that 100,000,000 Americans are morons?”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics. p. 35-44.

“The retreat of the nation's largest cultural minority from literary discourse does not make art healthier. Instead, it weakens the dialectic of cultural development. It makes American literature less diverse, less vital, and less representative”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

28
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Art

“One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against the emancipation of the Jews. All share in the government of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious, race that had ever lived in it - the race to whom we owed our religion and the purest spiritual stimulus and consolation to be found in all literature - a race in which ability seems as natural and hereditary as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling with the bluest bloods in Europe, has quickened them with its own indomitable impulsion.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

On Democracy (6 October 1884)

World , Religion , Nature

“Romance is the poetry of literature.”

Suzanne Curchod (1737–1794) French-Swiss salonist and writer

Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 676.

“Tibet preserved as best as it could, what India was no longer in a position to do. For example, 4000 books belonging to the Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit literature were translated into Tibetan language. Today, about 3800 of them are no longer even known in India. They were so completely destroyed. The work of destruction was so complete. Today much of old India is found in neighbouring countries like Tibet and Siam and Cambodia; and India's old past history cannot be reconstructed except with their aid.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

On Hinduism (2000)

Books , History , Past , Country

“The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply asserts being, "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2006, Faith, Reason and the University — Memories and Reflections (2006)

Wisdom , God , Faith , Religion

“Barani mourned: “Should the king consider the payment of a few tankas by way of jiziya as sufficient justification for their allowing all possible freedom to the infidels to observe and demonstrate all orders and detail of infidelity, to read the misleading literature of their faith, and to propagate their teachings, how could the true religion get the upper hand over other religions, and how could the emblems of Islam be held high? How will the true faith prevail if rulers allow the infidels to keep their temples, adorn their idols, and to make merry during their festivals with beating of drums and dhols, singing and dancing?””

Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357)

Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231

Faith , Religion , Way , Freedom

“A religious spirit animates the infancy of our literature, and must continue to gloe in its maturity. The public taste calls for this quality, and would relish no work in which it might be supplanted by a principle of infidelity. Our best authors have written under the influence of Christian feeling; but had they been destitute of this sentiment, they would have found it necessary to accommodate themselves to the opinions of the people, and follow Christian precedents. The beneficent influence of religion on literature, is like that of our evening sun, when it awakens in the clouds those beautiful and burning tints, which clothe the firmament in gold and purple. It constitutes the heart of learning - the great source of its moral power. Religion addresses itself to the highest and holiest of our sentiments - benevolence and veneration, and their excitement stirs up the imagination, strengthens the undeerstanding, and purifies the taste. Thus, both in the mind of the author and the reader, Christianity and literature act and react on each other, with the effect of elevating both, and carrying the human character to the highest perfection which it is destined to reach. Learning should be proud of this companionship, and exert all her wisdom to render it perpetual.”

Daniel Drake (1785–1852) American physician and writer

Daniel Drake (1834). Discourse on the History, Character, and Prospects of the West: Delivered to the Union Literary Society of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, at Their Ninth Anniversary, September 23, 1834. Truman and Smith. p. 31

Wisdom , People , Religion , Beauty

“Ed walked away from the program feeling fortified and stapled. His brain was buzzing, the way it always did just after Jeopardy! He loaded up the microbus with Atlases and poseidons and headed for Pope County. "I've had it," he sang. "I've had it with puns, alliteration, Russian literature, Italian neorealism, meaningless cross-references, and laundry lists of nonsense. I shall drive without a license, without clothing, without direction, and if I make it to Arkansas, fine, and if I'm running late, if I'm running a numbers game, it doesn't matter, I shall keep on running. Yes, this is the answer. This is the ending. I shall keep on running, because a body in motion tends to stay emotional, and it's better to feel. Pain is better than emptiness, emptiness is better than nothing, and nothing is better than this."”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

"Ed"
Lyrics, Happy Hour (1992)

Pain , Way , Feeling , Game

“There is a rhetoric of knowledge, a characteristic way in which arguments, proofs, speculations, experiments, polemics, even humor are expressed. …speaking or writing a subject is a performing art, and each subject requires a somewhat different kind of performance from every other. Historians, for example, do not speak or write history in the same way biologists speak or write biology. …it is worth remembering that some scholars-one thinks of Veblen in sociology, Freud in psychology, Galbraith in economics - have exerted influence as much through their manner as their matter. The point is that knowledge is a form of literature, and the various styles of knowledge ought to be studied and discussed.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)

Art , Way , History , Knowledge

“We may perhaps start by throwing all kinds of production into one variable, all consumption into another, and so on, imagining that the notions 'production', 'consumption', and so on, can be measured by some sort of total indices. At present certain examples of micro-dynamic analyses have been worked out, but as far as I know no determinate macro-dynamic analysis is yet to be found in the literature.”

Ragnar Frisch Propagation problems and impulse problems in dynamic economics

Source: 1930s, Propagation problems and impulse problems in dynamic economics, 1933, p. 173

Imagination

“This [Journalism] is not a profession of my choice. Nor is it family traditional occupation. God must have created this profession as a fit theater for all my struggles…Whatever I have written so far is about politics or philosophy, literature, music, poetry or even speeches I made either in the floor of assembly or from public-platforms-all these in a way touch one aspect of journalism or the other”

D. V. Gundappa (1887–1975) Indian writer

In page=18
D.V. Gundappa,Sahitya Akademi

God , Family , Music , Way

“The purpose of the Collège was the demolition of culture, even of surrealism, which they considered too organized. But make no mistake, these people were graduates of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and highly cultured. Their method was based on puns and practical jokes—le canular. There is a great tradition of puns in Anglo-Saxon literature — Shakespeare, Alice in Wonderland — but not in French. So they adopted it. They believed that the science of sciences is the pataphysique and its dogma, le canular.”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

le canular refers to hoaxes, humorous deceptions. -->
The Paris Review interview (1984)

People , Science

“This book is dedicated to the memory of my teacher Rudolf Bultmann. He encouraged me more than thirty years ago to deal more intensively with the extra-canonical writings from the early Christian period. His unwavering insistence upon the consistent application of the historical-critical method and his emphasis upon the investigation of early Christian literature in the context of the history of religions must remain basic commitments of New Testament scholarship.”

Helmut Koester (1926–2016) biblical scholar

Introduction to the New Testament (1982), Preface

Books , Religion , History , Teachers

“Heredity is not the dark specter which some people have thought—merciless and unchangeable, the embodiment of Fate itself. This dark, pessimistic belief which tinges even the literature of to-day comes, no doubt, from the general lack of knowledge of the laws governing the interaction of these two ever-present forces of heredity and environment wherever there is life.
My own studies have led me to be assured that heredity is only the sum of all past environment, in other words environment is the architect of heredity; and I am assured of another fact: acquired characters are transmitted and—even further—that all characters which are transmitted have been acquired…”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Life , Fate , People , Law

“An understandable hunger for … potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, … immune to the methods of factory farming.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), pp. 126-127.

Hunger , Truth , Understanding , Teachers

“In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence — but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself.
It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1962)

Men , Pleasure , Question , Nature

“I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Attributed

Learning

“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 (1863–1952) British palaeographer and biblical and classical scholar

Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter X, The Position Today, p. 134

Imagination

“It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 31

Pleasure , Error , Reading

“Suppression of all harmful influences in literature and the press, stage, art and cinema.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

Source: The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation (1923), p. 56

Art

“We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

2000s, The End of Faith (2004)

“The distinction between micro- and macroinventions is useful because, as historians of technology emphasize, the word first is hazardous in this literature.. Many technological breakthroughs had a history that began before the event generally regarded as “the invention,” and almost all macroinventions required subsequent improvements to make them operational. Yet in a large number of cases, one or two identifiable events were crucial. Without such breakthroughs technological progress would eventually fizzle out.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Source: The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, 1992, p. 14

History

“He ventured to enter his most earnest protest against the mode in which several Members of that House were inclined to treat anything that ran out of the common ruck—and introduced them to schemes and ideas which former debates had not reached. The scheme of the hon. Gentleman was not new—he should not have thought that it was new to many Members of that House; the literature of the country had been full of it for three or four years. They all instinctively felt that it was a scheme that had no chance of success. It was not of our atmosphere—it was not in accordance with our habits; it did not belong to us. They all knew that it could not pass. Whether that was creditable to the House or not was a question into which he would not inquire; but every Member of the House the moment he saw the scheme upon the Paper saw that it belonged to the class of impracticable things.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1867/may/30/committee-progress-may-28 in the House of Commons (30 May 1867) against John Stuart Mill's proposal for electing MPs by proportional representation
1860s

Idea , Question , Chance , Success

“Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), V. The Priority of Paradigms, p. 46

Education , Communication

“The time has probably come to admit that the notion of an avant-garde is no longer useful in discussing contemporary literature. How can there be an avant-garde without a mainstream? Avant-garde de quoi? one must ask. Establishment institutions — universities, museums, foundations, commercial galleries, even the state — have embraced the idea of experimental art for so long that the avant-garde is now a safely domesticated concept, just another traditional style.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Notes Toward a New Bohemia," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ebohemia.htm transcript of a 1993 talk at the Poet's House, New York City, published in Poetry Flash (November/December 1993) and revised for publication in Grantmakers in the Arts (Spring 1994)
Essays

Art , Idea , Universe , Time

“The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit — for gallantry in defeat — for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1962)

Love , War , Hope , Courage

“While this bourgeois order found its rich—and even affirmative—representation in art and literature, … it remained an order which was over-shadowed, broken, refuted by another dimension which was irreconcilably antagonistic to the order of business, indicting it and denying it. And in the literature, this other dimension is represented not by the religious, spiritual, moral heroes (who often sustain the established order) but rather by such disruptive characters as the artist. the prostitute, the adulteress, the great criminal and outcast, the warrior, the rebel-poet, the devil, the fool—those who don't earn a living, at least not in an orderly and normal way. To be sure, these characters have not disappeared from the literature of advanced industrial society, but they … perform a function very different from and even contrary to that of their cultural predecessors. They are no longer images of another way of life but rather freaks or types of the same life, serving as an affirmation rather than negation of the established order.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 58-59

Life , Fools , Art , Way

“It's funny, I grew up in a happy family with loving parents, but I've killed off a lot of parents in these books. The orphan in children's literature, allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: 'How did I come to be born to these parents?”

Brian Selznick (1966) American children's illustrator and writer

it is about finding your place in the world.
Source: Brian Selznick: how Scorsese's Hugo drew inspiration from his magical book https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/11/brian-selznick-hugo-martin-scorsese (February 11, 2012)

Love , Children , Books , World

“Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.”

Robert Benchley (1889–1945) American comedian

As quoted in The Routledge Dictionary of Quotations : A Dictionary of Quotations (1987) by Robert Andrews, p. 154

Soul , Spring

“For this reason, in any cultural development in which the immigrant shares and is a real contributive factor, a way must be found to make his religious beliefs and experience of use. This means more than to permit him to worship in his own way. It means more than toleration. It means the use for America of the finest aspirations and traditions of these men. It means an appreciation of their literature and of the art which has come out of these beliefs.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Men , Art , Way

“There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators... Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania for improvement.”

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist

1910s, Dada Manifesto', 1918

Men , World , Way , Hell

“Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.”

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) American academic

Introduction
The Portable Matthew Arnold (Viking Press, 1949)

Age , Religion , Exercises

“Whereas it might be erroneous to claim that the literature, art, and music of the Harlem Renaissance revolutionized the practice of democracy in the United States, it would not be an error to point out that the ideas they championed did impact America's understanding, and subsequently its application, of democracy.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(Author's Note, p. xvii).
Book Sources, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (2003)

Art , Music , Error , Democracy

“Passion is something which very few of us have really felt. What we may have felt is enthusiasm, which is being caught up in an emotional state over something. Our passion is for something: for music, for painting, for literature, for a country, for a woman or a man; it is always the effect of a cause. When you fall in love with someone, you are in a great state of emotion, which is the effect of that particular cause; and what I am talking about is passion without a cause. It is to be passionate about everything, not just about something, whereas most of us are passionate about a particular person or thing. I think one must see this distinction very clearly. In the state of passion without a cause, there is intensity free of all attachment; but when passion has a cause, there is attachment, and attachment is the beginning of sorrow.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Vol. XIII, p. 251
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works

Love , Music , Thinking , Passion

“In schools, for example, there are courses in the criticism of literature, art criticism, and so forth. The arts are supposed to be 'not real.' It is quite safe, therefore, to criticize them in that regard -- to see how a story or a painting is constructed, or more importantly, to critically analyze the structure of ideas, themes, or beliefs that appear, say, in the poem or work of fiction. When children are taught science, there is no criticism allowed. They are told, 'This is how things are.' Science's reasons are given as the only true statements about reality, with which no student is expected to quarrel. Any strong intellectual explorations or counter versions of reality have appeared in science fiction, for example. Here scientists, many being science-fiction buffs, can channel their own intellectual questioning into a safe form. 'This is, after all, merely imaginative and not to be taken seriously.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 145-146

Children , School , Art , Imagination

“Have we not hereditary possessions in our just laws, our free and nobly developed constitution, our rich literature and philosophy, incomparably above material wealth, and which we are beyond all things bound to maintain, improve, and hand down in safety? And do we accomplish this duty in encouraging a growth of industry which must prove unstable, and perhaps involve all things in its fall?”

William Stanley Jevons book The Coal Question

The Coal Question (1865)

Law , Wealth

“In combination with other infernal contraptions, like rockets to deliver bombs at large distances, chemical, biological and radioactive poisons, such a war must mean a degree of human suffering and degradation which is beyond the power of imagination. No country would be immune, but those with highly developed industry would suffer most. It is very doubtful whether our technological civilization would survive such a catastrophe.
One may be inclined to regard this as no great loss, but as a just punishment for its shortcomings and sins: the lack of productive genius in art and literature, the neglect of the moral teachings of religion and philosophy, the slowness to abandon outdated political conceptions, like national sovereignty. Yet we are all involved in this tragedy, and the instinct of self-preservation, the love of our children, makes us think about a way of salvation.”

Max Born (1882–1970) physicist

Physics in my generation (1956)

Love , War , Children , Religion

“A university teaches. What does it teach? It must obviously teach all the languages in which the great literatures which have been preserved were written — Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Scandinavian, and English.”

Charles William Eliot (1834–1926) President of Harvard

[Z. Elmarsafy, A. Bernard, D. Attwell, Debating Orientalism, https://books.google.com/books?id=VP6ARP2m-D0C&pg=PA82, 13 June 2013, Springer, 978-1-137-34111-2, 82]

Universe

“Of historic method, indeed, nothing wiser has ever been said than a word which will be found in Gibbon's youthful Essay on the Study of Literature. Facts, the young sage instructs us, are of three kinds: those which prove nothing beyond themselves, those which serve to illustrate a character or explain a motive, and those which dominate the system and move its springs.”

G. M. Young (1882–1959) English historian

Portrait of an Age (1936)

Youth , Spring , Motivation , Study

“When a great politician dies, or any man who has filled a large space in the public mind, and made a noise in the world, the newspapers long ring with the event. But it is otherwise with the great thinker, the mathematician or the philosopher, who has laboured silently and in comparative seclusion, to extend the boundaries of human knowledge. When such a man is removed by death there are public journals, even among those professedly devoted to literature and science, which can dismiss the event with a few faint and cold remarks.* But time rectifies all that. It is found sooner or later that no reputation, however brilliant, is permanent or durable which does not rest on useful discoveries and real contributions to our knowledge.”

Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897) English journalist

R.H. Hutton, "Professor Boole," in: The British Quarterly Review http://books.google.com/books?id=pfMEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA165. (1866), p. 141

Death , World , Knowledge , Science

“A real atheist, needless to say, will disregard what the dervishes think it expedient to say about the "New Testament" when they make their pitch to the ignorant. He will read the myths for himself and objectively consider and appraise them as a whole, including the social gospel that is, indeed, the most important and operative part of them. And he will shudder at the Judaic malevolence that inspires them, the vicious hatred of culture and civilization. They were designed to create a foul and squalid world in which every instinctive value of our race is negated and aborted--a world in which the natural ties of family and property have been severed, leaving only rootless and helpless individuals, isolated and lost in the terrible loneliness of crowds--a world without history, without philosophy, without science, without reason--a world without beauty of any kind, without art, without literature, without culture--a world without real love, the love that unites men and women, and without even the Aryan's instinctive feeling for the beauty of women and physical health.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"The Bear in the Bush", Liberty Bell (September 1990)
1990s

Love , Women , Men , Health

“We have hereafter only two roads to choose: one is to embrace the ancient literature and die, the other is to forsake the ancient literature and live.”

Lu Xun (1881–1936) Chinese novelist and essayist

32
"The Epigrams of Lusin"

“But I'm not here to talk about postmodernism. I tried to do that last spring, and afterwards I was thoroughly deconstructed by the deconstructionists for attempting to deconstruct deconstructionism. At least, that's the construction I put on their construction of it. I was talking about postmodern culture, and they thought I was talking about postmodern literature. Not at all the same thing!”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Public Talks, "3rd State of the Onion"

Spring

“Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best judgement not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth; placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

World , Way , Soul , Thinking

“Realism's 'truth' as embodied in painting and literature now solely consists of things capable of being seen by the eye or heard by the ear. Realism is concerned only with the external shell of nature. People content with the discoveries they have made ignore the fact that there are other things to be discovered, even broader avenues to be explored. They have found bacteria, but not what they consist of. [quote of 1892)”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

OKK 1760 (Nice, January 1892); as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 81
1880 - 1895

People , Truth , Quotes , Nature

“Pāṇini had before him a list of irregularly formed words, which survives, in a somewhat modified form, as the Uṇādi Sūtra. There are also two appendixes to which Pāṇini refers: one is the Dhātupāṭha, "List of Verbal Roots," containing some 2000 roots, of which only about 800 have been found in Sanskrit literature, and from which about fifty Vedic verbs are omitted; the second is the Gaṇapāṭha, or "List of Word-Groups," to which certain rules apply. These gaṇas were metrically arranged in the Gaṇaratna-mahodadhi, composed by Vardhamāna in 1140 A. D.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Appendix A History of Sanskrit Literature

“Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 45

Science

“It was the tragedy of modernist artists, Left or Right, that the much more effective political commitment of their own mass movements and politicians - not to mention their adversaries - rejected them. With the partial exception of Futurist-influenced Italian fascism, the new authoritarian regimes of both Right and Left preferred old-fashioned and gigantic monumental buildings and vistas in architecture, inspirational representations in both painting and sculpture, elaborate performances of the classics on stage, and ideological acceptability in literature.”

Eric Hobsbawm book The Age of Extremes

The Arts 1914-1945
The Age of Extremes (1992)

Fashion , Painting

“There is no doubt that Sankara before him had set the wheel of inquiry by boldly declaring Advaita as the answers to all the questions posed by different Upanishads. He has tried to synthesize the approach and took up the Brahma sutras of Vyasa as the basic text for study. The Brahma sutras is an extraordinary text. Before Sage Vyasa a very great body of literature has accumulated mainly in the Upanishads, most of the time speaking in one voice about Brahama vidya and at the same time throwing in diverse suggestions It has grown up almost like a banyan tree with overgrown branches. Vyasa by reducing many of these concepts into short and crisp sutras has provided behind each sutra an ocean of knowledge. It is impossible to understand the whole body of knowledge in a unitary way. Sankara brought in a cohesion. He was close to the Vedic ideals in point of time …”

R. Nagaswamy (1930) Indian academic

"Ramanuja Myth & Reality A Critical Study Of Ramanujas Life & Works

Way , Understanding , Question , Knowledge

“Bob Dylan: The media is all-pervasive. What can a writer think of to write that you don't see every day in a newspaper or on television?
Interviewer: …Do you think that TV and the media have killed poetry and literature?
Bob Dylan: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. … What's a writer to do if every idea is exposed in the media before he can get to it or let it evolve? What's a writer gonna write about? … We're living in a science-fiction world. We're living in a world that Disney has conquered. Disney's science fiction. Theme parks, trendy streets, it's all science fiction. So I would say, if a writer has got something to say, he'll have to do it in that–
Interviewer: Outside of the real world?
Bob Dylan: There is a real world. Science fiction has become the real world. Whether we realize it or not, it has.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

The Rome Press Conference (23 July 2001)

World , Idea , Thinking , Science

“I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.”

Sidney Hook (1902–1989) American philosopher

Out of Step (1985)

Hope

“Almost every culture in the Thousand Cultures had some wisdom literature, and much of it was the same between any two cultures.... Cultures tend to be alike in much of what they think are the basic virtues, but one of the ones they are most alike in, though it rarely appears in their book of wisdom, is: Distrust strangers, fear foreigners, dread novelty.”

John Barnes book Earth Made of Glass

Earth Made of Glass (1998)

Wisdom , Books , Fear , Thinking

“The distinction between "language" and "speech" rests on easily observable facts. The theoretical aspect of the issue has been raised in contemporary literature only by de Saussure, although in the terminological sense all the languages (I refer here to our cultural circle and its traditions), beginning with the distinction … lingua and sermo in Latin, accept the difference between "language" as a system of linguistic facts and "speech" as the name of a type of action. Following de Saussure, that theoretical distinction has been adopted in all contemporary linguistics. Gardiner distinguishes between speech as an activity with clearly utilitarian ends in view, and language as a precise knowledge pertaining to communication by means of verbal signs'*. The differentiation has been adopted in the Marxist literature of the subject, linguistic, psychological, etc. In his Psychology (in Russian) S. L. Rubinshtein defines speech as language functioning in the context of individual consciousness, and compares the difference between speech and language to the difference between individual and social consciousness.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Source: Introduction to semantics, 1962, p. 316

Communication , Knowledge , Sense

“Now, it is a recognised fact that the contribution of European scholars in general and of British historians in particular to the study of Muslim literature and history is invaluable. … Their painstaking diligence and honesty compel our admiration. … Indian historians owe a lot to the pioneering researches of British historians, whatever may be said about their merits and shortcomings. …. There is no need to get ruffled about such assertions. Most of the conclusions of British historians about Muslim history do find confirmation in the description of cruelties perpetrated by the Muslims in their own chronicles as well as their reiteration in indigenous source materials in Hindi, Sanskrit, Rajasthani and Marathi. Hindu source materials are few. They are also not as informative as the Muslim chronicles. But curiously enough the meagre Hindu and the voluminous Muslim source-materials corroborate and supplement rather than contradict each other about the behaviour of the Muslim regime.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 3

History , Study

“The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

"Avant-Garde and Kitsch" http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html (1939), p. 19
1960s, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (1961)

Art

“Although the great revolution of 1793 changed the whole face of France both politically and socially, it failed to emancipate the twin arts of painting and literature. In each case one tradition was succeeded by another, and nearly forty years elapsed before the new spirit completely broke through the barriers set up by a past generation.”

Wynford Dewhurst (1864–1941) British artist

Source: Impressionist Painting: its genesis and development. (1904), p. 1: Ch. 1. The evolution of the impressionistic idea.

Art , Change , Past , Painting

“The detective embodies, even more than the romantic drifter, rationality; this intriguing and apparent dichotomy pertains to a significant part of Bengali children’s literature as well – that ofen, especially in the proliferation of adventure, spy and mystery genres in Bengali in the first half of the twentieth century, children’s literature is not so much an escape from the humanist logos of ‘high’ literary practice, but a coming to its irreducible possibilities from a different direction.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Clearing a Space (2008)

Children , Parting

“In that strange island Iceland,—burst up, the geologists say, by fire from the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swallowed many months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summertime; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean with its snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;—where of all places we least looked for Literature or written memorials, the record of these things was written down.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Beauty , Memory , Sea

“Of all these offenses the one that is most widely, frequently, and vehemently denounced is undoubtedly imperialism—sometimes just Western, sometimes Eastern (that is, Soviet) and Western alike. But the way this term is used in the literature of Islamic fundamentalists often suggests that it may not carry quite the same meaning for them as for its Western critics. In many of these writings the term "imperialist" is given a distinctly religious significance, being used in association, and sometimes interchangeably, with "missionary," and denoting a form of attack that includes the Crusades as well as the modern colonial empires. One also sometimes gets the impression that the offense of imperialism is not—as for Western critics—the domination by one people over another but rather the allocation of roles in this relationship. What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law, and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society, and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God's law. This may help us to understand the current troubles in such diverse places as Ethiopian Eritrea, Indian Kashmir, Chinese Sinkiang, and Yugoslav Kossovo, in all of which Muslim populations are ruled by non-Muslim governments. It may also explain why spokesmen for the new Muslim minorities in Western Europe demand for Islam a degree of legal protection which those countries no longer give to Christianity and have never given to Judaism. Nor, of course, did the governments of the countries of origin of these Muslim spokesmen ever accord such protection to religions other than their own. In their perception, there is no contradiction in these attitudes. The true faith, based on God's final revelation, must be protected from insult and abuse; other faiths, being either false or incomplete, have no right to any such protection.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

God , People , Faith , Religion

“Winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

"A Mock Columnist, Amok" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/opinion/14dowd.html, in The New York Times (14 October 2007)

Peace , Thinking , Science

“Neither citation nor loan demand is an adequate measure of literature use by a large community. Each is only an indicator, illuminating some aspects of use but with its own inherent bias. The joint study of several indicators gives a more balanced picture..”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Penelope Earle and Brian Campbell Vickery (1969), "Social Science Literature Use in the U.K. as Indicated by Citations," Journal of Documentation 25: p. 133; As cited in Yasar Tonta, Yurdagül Ünal (2005) "Scatter of journals and literature obsolescence reflected in document delivery requests". JASIST 56(1): 84-94.

Communication , Study

“Thus it has come about that our theoretical and critical literature, instead of giving plain, straightforward arguments in which the author at least always knows what he is saying and the reader what he is reading, is crammed with jargon, ending at obscure crossroads where the author loses its readers. Sometimes these books are even worse: they are just hollow shells. The author himself no longer knows just what he is thinking and soothes himself with obscure ideas which would not satisfy him if expressed in plain speech.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 2

Books , Idea , Thinking , Reading

“During the thirty years I have spent abroad I have felt I was more privileged than my Western colleagues, whether writers or teachers of literature, for events both recent and long past took in my mind a sharply delineated, precise form. Western audiences confronted with poems or novels written in Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary, or with films produced there, possibly intuit a similarly sharpened consciousness, in a constant struggle against limitations imposed by censorship. Memory thus is our force, it protects us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)

Support , Tree , Teachers , Memory

“The assumption that effective cartographic technique and its evaluation is based in part on some subjective artistic or aesthetic sense on the part of the cartographer and map reader is somewhat disconcerting. For example, E. Raisz claims that the “effective use of lines or colors requires artistic judgment,” and J. K. Wright explains that the suitability of a symbol “depends on the map maker's taste and sense of harmony.” Throughout the literature there are numerous similar assertions regarding the assumed subjective aesthetic and artistic content of cartography.”

Arthur H. Robinson (1915–2004) American geographer

Source: The Look of Maps (1952), p. 16; as cited in: Kirk Patrick Goldsberry (2007) Real-time Traffic Maps. p. 23

Color , Sense , Parting , Dependency

“A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.”

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

People , Personality

“Good literature continually read for pleasure must, let us hope, do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

The Name and Nature of Poetry

Pleasure , Hope , Reading , Personality

“Again, we should notice the force, effect, and consequences of inventions, which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world; first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in navigation: and innumerable changes have been thence derived, so that no empire, sect, or star, appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.”

Francis Bacon book Novum Organum

Aphorism 129
Novum Organum (1620), Book I

World , Exercises , Star , Appearance

“When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare.”

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) English illustrator and author

Table Talk" p. 63
Under the Hill and Other Essays (1904)

Feeling , Study

“Contingency theories dominate scholarly studies of organization behavior, design, performance, planning and management strategy. While they vary widely in subject matter, they have the common proposition that an organizational outcome is the consequency of a "fit" or match between two or more factors. "Fit" is the key concept in this proposition, and the core problem common to contingency theories is not defining this term clearly. This paper examines three ways to define and test this concept of fit: Selection, Interaction, and Systems approaches. A critical discussion of these three approaches will clarify much of the current confusion in the literature on contingency theories, and suggest ways that future theorizing and research can become more systematic and constructive.”

Andrew H. Van de Ven (1945) American business theorist

Andrew H. Van de Ven and Robert Drazin (1984). The Concept of Fit in Contingency Theory http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA152603. No. SMRC-DP-19). Minneapolis: Minnesota University Minneapolis Strategic Management Research Center.

Way , Behavior , Problem , Study

“Literature has many uses, not all of which occur in a classroom”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

20
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

“What is the democratic peace? In the literature on or referring to the democratic peace, this means the idea or fact that democracies do not (or virtually never) make war on each other.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

“What Is The Democratic Peace?” https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP.IS_WHAT.HTM

War , Peace , Democracy , Idea

“It is a shameful sign of our arrogance that our history departments have almost no Chinese history in them, our literature courses almost no Chinese literature, our philosophy departments almost none of the great Chinese systems of philosophy. And our religious schools have been the most arrogant of all.
This ignorant arrogant mind has become fixed in its patterns. It is the pattern which considers anything not American to be inferior — unless it be English.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

"China and the Federal Union" an address at the Federal Union organization, New York City (April 1942) http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/Buck/excerpt-fu.html

School , History