top of page

"It's not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes

"Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism."

"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there."

"It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them."

"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."

"In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river."

"And please, stay away from those books you devour. They are putting the most fantastical tales into your head."

"The composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelting to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity."

"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
Explore more quotes by Saint Augustine


"Such is the strength of the burden of habit. Here I have the power to be but do not wish it. There I wish to be but lacks the power. On both grounds, I'm in misery."


"To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement."


"Indeed we also work, but we are only collaborating with God who works, for his mercy has gone before us. It has gone before us so that we may be healed, and follows us so that once healed, we may be given life; it goes before us so that we may be called, and follows us so that we may be glorified; it goes before us so that we may live devoutly, and follows us so that we may always live with God: for without him we can do nothing."


"But perhaps there are insensitive hearts, still incapable of receiving this Light because the weight of their sins prevents them from seeing it. Let them not imagine that they Light is absent because they do not see it, for on account of their sins they are in darkness. 'And the Light shone in the darkness, and the darkness understood it not' (Jn 1:5). Therefore, Brothers, like the blind man exposed to the sun, the sun being present to him but he being absent from the sun, so the insensitive one, the sinner, the impious has a blind heart."


"Lord Jesus, don't let me lie when I say that I love you...and protect me, for today I could betray you."


"This is pride when the soul abandons Him to Whom it ought to cleave as its end and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction."


"I fell away from you, my God, and I went astray, too far astray from you, the support of my youth, and I became to myself a land of want."


"For you [God] are infinite and never change. In you 'today' never comes to an end: and yet our 'today' does come to an end in you, because time, as well as everything else, exists in you. If it did not, it would have no means of passing. And since your years never come to an end, for you they are simply 'today'...But you yourself are eternally the same. In your 'today' you will make all that is to exist tomorrow and thereafter, and in your 'today' you have made all that existed yesterday and for ever before."
bottom of page