Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.
The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.
It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.
Geniuses are people who notice things and connections between things which others haven't noticed. Genius must be a surprise.
I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.
Appreciation has become my destiny in life. Perhaps it's the instinct of a polar bear enjoying hibernation in the vast snows.
If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!
Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.
I have been obsequious toward Western civilization, exaggerating its merits and, at the same time, exaggerating my own merits.
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.
I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.
The poet craves emotion, and feeds the fire that consumes him, and only under this condition is he baptized with creative power.
For me, a garden is peace of mind. It immediately takes my mind off the thing I'm puzzling about in my work and gives me repose.
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.
Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.
Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.
It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.
The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.
The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.
My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I've got a 50 percent chance of living a long life like him.
The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.
I have viewed the West as if it were not only the salvation of China but also the natural and ultimate destination of all humanity.
It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.
The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.
an autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.
I believe we need literature, which, by allowing us to experience more fully, to imagine more fully, enables us to live more freely.
The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me... by newspapers and the Bible.
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail; and when you're a left-wing sorehead, everything is an occasion to damn the rich.
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.
A possession considered of little value up to now suddenly becomes precious to a person if another person desires it, don't you think?
The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.