top of page
"Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes

"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."

"The lot of the brideto be wed before beddesired until rotten.The lot of the authorto be read before bedadmired then forgotten."

"An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better."

"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."

"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."

"Rain's pouring and it's too cold. All people bored and I even accord What to do but spell a tale told: So once upon a time a land in the shore..."

"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature."

"Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it."

"Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence, many epic tales are pretty much epic crap."

"Tolkien did admit that, 'As a guide, I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving.' In other words ~ he wrote about what interested him ~ and despite his protestation of including anything allegorical into his tale, Catholic history and mystic prophecy obviously received its fair share of attention ..."
Explore more quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

"The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations."

"When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility."

"A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt."

"Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle."

"The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them."

"The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship, even natural to worship unnatural things."

"Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical to start by saying 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth' even ifyou only mean 'In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process.' For God is by its nature aname of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than he couldcreate one. But evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else."
bottom of page