Great Books Quotes

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Quotes About Great Books

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One of the purest souls ever to live on this fallen planet was Nicholas Herman, known as Brother Lawrence. He wrote very little, but what he wrote has seemed to several generations of Christians to be so rare and so beautiful as to deserve a place near the top among the world's great books of devotion. The writings of Brother Lawrence are the ultimate in simplicity; ideas woven like costly threads to make a pattern of great beauty. ~ A.W. Tozer
Great Books quotes by A.W. Tozer
Betsy was so full of joy that she had to be alone. She went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down on Uncle Keith's trunk. Behind Tacy's house the sun had set. A wind had sprung up and the trees, their color dimmed, moved under a brooding sky. All the stories she had told Tacy and Tib seemed to be dancing in those trees, along with all the stories she planned to write some day and all the stories she would read at the library. Good stories. Great stories. The classics. Not Rena's novels. ~ Maud Hart Lovelace
Great Books quotes by Maud Hart Lovelace
Great books can be ruined by bad writers. ~ Travis Simmons
Great Books quotes by Travis Simmons
The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered. ~ Pat Conroy
Great Books quotes by Pat Conroy
Personal tranquility consists in the orderly structuring of the mind, which occurs whenever a person engages in the exquisite practice of contemplating personal experiences, harmonizing time spent with other people, reading great books, and working on self-improvement. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster
Great Books quotes by Kilroy J. Oldster
We encounter great souls by reading great books. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
Great Books quotes by Lailah Gifty Akita
The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine - but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously. ~ Joseph Joubert
Great Books quotes by Joseph Joubert
the best of Cervantes is untranslatable, and this undeniable fact is in itself an incentive [for one and all] to learn Spanish. ~ Aubrey F.G. Bell
Great Books quotes by Aubrey F.G. Bell
It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get.
There are no really fresh ideas; just as there is not any fresh air. Air and ideas are refreshed and refreshing, vitalized and vitalizing; but the thoughts have been thought before and the air has been breathed before. ~ Eugene Manlove Rhodes
Great Books quotes by Eugene Manlove Rhodes
Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have not the time nor means to get more. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Great Books quotes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Good books makes good life.
Great books makes great life. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
Great Books quotes by Lailah Gifty Akita
We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things. ~ Joseph Joubert
Great Books quotes by Joseph Joubert
Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely. ~ David McCullough
Great Books quotes by David McCullough
Gulliver was soon being read "from the cabinet council to the nursery". ~ John Gay
Great Books quotes by John Gay
The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress upon relatively unimportant modern work, and to present masses of detail of doubtful truth and questionable weight in such a way as to obscure principles. ~ Ronald Fisher
Great Books quotes by Ronald Fisher
Now, I can tell you about some women writers who truly are fantastic. One is Anna Kavan. She writes stories like I approach "Land of a Thousand Dances": she's caught in a haze and then a light, a little teeny light, come through. It could be a leopard, that light, or it could be a spot of blood. It could be anything. But she hooks onto that and spirals out. And she does it within the accessible rhythms of plot, and that's really exciting. She's not hung up with being a woman, she just keeps extending herself, keeps telescoping language and plot.

Another great woman writer is Iris Sarazan, who wrote The Runaway. She considered herself a mare, a wild runaway. She was a really intelligent girl stuck in all these convents with a hungry mind. I identify with her 'cause of her hunger to go beyond herself. She wound up in prison, but she escaped and wrote some great books before kicking off. Her books aren't page after page of her beating her breast about how shitty she's been treated, they're books about her exciting telescoping plans of escape. Rhythm, great wild rhythm....

The French poet, Rimbaud, predicted that the next great crop of writers would be women. He was the first guy who ever made a big women's liberation statement, saying that when women release themselves from the long servitude of men they're really gonna gush. New rhythms, new poetries, new horrors, new beauties. And I believe in that completely. (1976 Penthouse interview) ~ Patti Smith
Great Books quotes by Patti Smith
Maybe great books were coiled within him like springs, books that could have separated inside from outside. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer
Great Books quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer
Read what gives you delight - at least most of the time - and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefl y by what some people call Great Books, don't make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed. ~ Alan Jacobs
Great Books quotes by Alan Jacobs
I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand. ~ Edward Abbey
Great Books quotes by Edward Abbey
That's one of the amazing things great books like this do - they don't just get you to see the world differently, they get you to look at people, the people all around you, differently. ~ Will Schwalbe
Great Books quotes by Will Schwalbe
I was filled with angst in college, that I struggled with the question of my future, the meaning of my life - spoiled sheltered rich girl collides with great books and is devastated by her own banality. ~ Elizabeth Kostova
Great Books quotes by Elizabeth Kostova
Art is a conversation we are all invited to and are all worthy to participate in. Yes, great works can be intimidating, but no one else in the world has what you have - your voice, your eyes, your feeling and perspective. Other people have written great books, but no one else will ever write YOUR book. It's worth writing. That is the belief that carries me through. ~ Rachel Hartman
Great Books quotes by Rachel Hartman
How happily we explored our shiny new world! We lived like characters from the great books I curled up with in the big Draylon armchair. Like Jack Kerouak, like Gatsby, we created ourselves as we went along, a raggle-taggle of gypsies in old army overcoats and bell-bottoms, straggling through the fields that surrounded our granite farmhouse in search of firewood, which we dragged home and stacked in the living room. Ignorant and innocent, we acted as if the world belonged to us, as though we would ever have taken the time to hang the regency wallpaper we damaged so casually with half-rotten firewood, or would have known how to hang it straight, or smooth the seams. We broke logs against the massive tiled hearth and piled them against the sooty fire back, like the logs were tradition and we were burning it, like chimney fires could never happen, like the house didn't really belong to the poor divorcee who paid the rates and mortgage even as we sat around the flames like hunter gatherers, smoking Lebanese gold, chanting and playing the drums, dancing to the tortured music of Luke's guitar. Impelled by the rhythm, fortified by poorly digested scraps of Lao Tzu, we got up to dance, regardless of the coffee we knocked over onto the shag carpet. We sopped it up carelessly, or let it sit there as it would; later was time enough. We were committed to the moment.




Everything was easy and beautiful if you looked at it right. If someone was angry, we walked d ~ Claire Robson
Great Books quotes by Claire Robson
Read great books and be great. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
Great Books quotes by Lailah Gifty Akita
There are a million great books out there if you just go to Google. There's a lot to pull apart. A lot of crazy, unbelievable stuff that's all completely true. I get into little obsessions, and I read everything I can find on one thing, and then I move onto another. ~ Caitlin Kittredge
Great Books quotes by Caitlin Kittredge
morigu the desacration and morigu the dead great books but series is unfinished ~ Mark C. Perry
Great Books quotes by Mark C. Perry
When I find myself in a dreaded reading slump, nothing boosts me out of it faster than revisiting an old favorite. Old books, like old friends, are good for the soul. But they're not just comfort reads. No, a good book is exciting to return to, because even though I've been there before, the landscape is always changing. I notice something new each time I read a great book. As Italo Calvino wrote, "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." Great books keep surprising me with new things. ~ Anne Bogel
Great Books quotes by Anne Bogel
If you taught me to read and provided for me the same computer system as someone has provided for Stephen Hawking, I, too, would write great books. And yet you don't teach me to read, and you don't give me a computer stick I can push around with my nose to point at the next letter I wish typed. So whose fault is it that I am what I am? ~ Garth Stein
Great Books quotes by Garth Stein
Great books, if long enough and full of topical description and contemporary comment, were now coming into even wider public favor. The lengthier and fuller of comment, the better. ~ James Purdy
Great Books quotes by James Purdy
Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books." That, for instance, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice," or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written "Dr. Zhivago," or Faulkner's corn-cobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces" or at least what journalists term "great books," is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's "Ulysses"; Kafka's "Transformation"; Bely's "St. Petersburg," and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, "In Search of Lost Time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov
Great Books quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry. ~ Chad Harbach
Great Books quotes by Chad Harbach
John stuart mill knew several languages, advanced math and read many great books' before he was ten years old. his father taught him. in his early twenties he had a nervous breakdown and didn't leave his bed for three years. he read poetry and at started to feel better. he was a feminist and cared about human rights. five people went to his funeral ~ Megan Boyle
Great Books quotes by Megan Boyle
The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action. ~ Russell Kirk
Great Books quotes by Russell Kirk
I read books and talked to people. I mean that's kind of how one learns anything. There's lots of great books out there & lots of smart people. ~ Elon Musk
Great Books quotes by Elon Musk
Looking back over my own life I here declare without apology that it is the study of God's Word, year after year, close communion with Christ, and great books that have nourished my soul in wondrous ways. Such authors as Fenelon, Henry Drummond, F. B. Meyer, G. Campbell Morgan, Martyn Lloyd Jones, A. W. Tozer, Hannah Whitehall Smith Oswald Chambers, Andrew Murray and John Stott have each, with their own special insights, enriched my life beyond measure. ~ W. Phillip Keller
Great Books quotes by W. Phillip Keller
It's the process of writing and life that matters.Too many writers have written great books and gone insane or alcoholic or killed themselves. This process teaches about sanity. We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories. ~ Natalie Goldberg
Great Books quotes by Natalie Goldberg
Whenever we read a book we love, we change it, to some extent. We read into it our own interpretations, and the meanings which the words have taken on in our time. If a book is so rigid that it cannot lend itself to these fluctuations, it is useful only while it seems strictly true, and afterwards it is completely out of date. ~ John Erskine
Great Books quotes by John Erskine
Great books make a great life. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
Great Books quotes by Lailah Gifty Akita
By small and simple sentences, great books come to pass. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich
Great Books quotes by Richelle E. Goodrich
I learned a simple lesson about being awesome: always play to the size of your heart, not to the size of your audience. Awesome doesn't let the crowd determine the size of the performance. Awesome gets up for two people or 200. Awesome writes great books even if no one is going to read them. Awesome sweeps the parts of store floors that no foot will ever touch. Awesome can't help itself. Awesome has a huge heart. And that's what it always plays to. The size of the crowd doesn't matter. The applause of the audience doesn't matter. ~ Jon Acuff
Great Books quotes by Jon Acuff
You will face many dangers on your journey, but fear not, for I have brought you this for your protection. In this box are all the words I know,' he said. 'Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. ~ Norton Juster
Great Books quotes by Norton Juster
Good books teach you about others;
great books teach you about yourself. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo
Great Books quotes by Matshona Dhliwayo
I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me. ~ Charles Bukowski
Great Books quotes by Charles Bukowski
I generally travel with my laptop, a couple of great books, and my iPod. ~ Orlando Bloom
Great Books quotes by Orlando Bloom
When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books. ~ Betsy Lerner
Great Books quotes by Betsy Lerner
Great books don't make great movies. There's too much information in there. ~ Casey Affleck
Great Books quotes by Casey Affleck
Reading great books always gives me the worst sleeping disorders. ~ Love The Stacks Bookstore
Great Books quotes by Love The Stacks Bookstore
I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that. ~ Stephen Colbert
Great Books quotes by Stephen Colbert
It's a terrible mistake to let the perfect get in the way of the good. If you wait to publish until you have written a great book, you will never publish anything. Great books happen by chance, not by design. The wise writer writes the best he can and leaves it to posterity to decide about greatness. ~ Andrew M. Greeley
Great Books quotes by Andrew M. Greeley
A singer can quit once he or she has made ten great songs; a director can finish once he or she has made five amazing films; a writer just needs to write three great books. ~ Alber Elbaz
Great Books quotes by Alber Elbaz
Why aren't more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books aren't within everybody's reach. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Great Books quotes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Great books inspire great minds. Great minds master many disciplines. The most difficult discipline to master is self discipline. ~ James Brown
Great Books quotes by James             Brown
Awesome writes great books even if no one is going to read them. ~ Jon Acuff
Great Books quotes by Jon Acuff
Good books leave an impression. Great books forever alter the way you think about what it means to be alive. You Disappear is not just a well-told story, but a dramatic recalibrating of what it means to have a mind-and a soul. ~ Dara Horn
Great Books quotes by Dara Horn
Reading great books gives insight to the mind of great souls. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
Great Books quotes by Lailah Gifty Akita
The best leaders are the most dedicated learners. Read great books daily. ~ Robin Sharma
Great Books quotes by Robin Sharma
I knew that the languages which one learns there are necessary to understand the works of the ancients; and that the delicacy of fiction enlivens the mind; that famous deeds of history ennoble it and, if read with understanding, aid in maturing one's judgment; that the reading of all the great books is like conversing with the best people of earlier times; it is even studied conversation in which the authors show us only the best of their thoughts; that eloquence has incomparable powers and beauties; that poetry has enchanting delicacy and sweetness; that mathematics has very subtle processes which can serve as much to satisfy the inquiring mind as to aid all the arts and diminish man's labor; that treatises on morals contain very useful teachings and exhortations to virtue; that theology teaches us how to go to heaven; that philosophy teaches us to talk with appearance of truth about things, and to make ourselves admired by the less learned; that law, medicine, and the other sciences bring honors and wealth to those who pursue them; and finally, that it is desirable to have examined all of them, even to the most superstitious and false in order to recognize their real worth and avoid being deceived thereby ~ Rene Descartes
Great Books quotes by Rene Descartes
The initial small step is simple: Rather than making a sweeping determination to tackle the Great Books (all of them), decide to begin on one of the reading lists in Part II. As you read each book, you'll follow the pattern of the trivium. First you'll try to understand the book's basic structure and argument; next, you'll evaluate the book's assertions; finally, you'll form an opinion about the book's ideas. You'll have to exercise these three skills of reading - understanding, analysis, and evaluation - differently for each kind of book. ~ Susan Wise Bauer
Great Books quotes by Susan Wise Bauer
Great books are weighted and measured by their style and matter, and not the trimmings and shadings of their grammar. ~ Mark Twain
Great Books quotes by Mark Twain
Robert Pattinson reads all of the time and he refers so many great books. ~ Kellan Lutz
Great Books quotes by Kellan Lutz
Greatest companion is found in reading great books. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
Great Books quotes by Lailah Gifty Akita
I ignored the teasing tone of the man who stood beside me, the four-hundred-year-old Master vampire who ruled Chicago's Cadogan House and the parts of my heart that weren't devoted to great books and good pizza. ~ Chloe Neill
Great Books quotes by Chloe Neill
I got it! I got it!" Heeb declared triumphantly. Evan stopped in the middle of his kitchenette to hear Heeb's idea.
"Sex in the Title."
"Yeah, that's what you've been saying I need."
"No, that's the title: 'Sex in the Title.'"
"You want me to call my novel 'Sex in the Title?'"
"Yeah. Isn't it great? ~ Zack Love
Great Books quotes by Zack Love
Bicycling beyond the Divide did what all great books do: it told me about me. In its tale of a journey made by two different men-both of them Daryl Farmer-this book offers us not only moving vistas and meaningful people, but also hope, that rarest of literary commodities these days. I didn't want this to end. ~ Bret Lott
Great Books quotes by Bret Lott
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches. ~ Bertrand Russell
Great Books quotes by Bertrand Russell
great books are the ones we need ~ Charles Bukowski
Great Books quotes by Charles Bukowski
The value of experience, real or imagined, is that is shows us how to - or how NOT to - live. In reading about different characters and the consequences of their choices, I was finding myself changed. I was discovering new and distinct ways of undergoing life's sorrows and joys ...
and all the great books I was reading - were about the complexity and entirety of the human experience. About the things we wish to forget and those we want more and more of. About how we react and how we wish we could react. Books ARE experience, the words of authors proving the solace of love, the fulfillment of family, the torment of war, and the wisdom of memory. Joy and tears, pleasure and pain: everything came to me while I read in my purple chair. i had never sat so still, and yet experienced so much. ~ Nina Sankovitch
Great Books quotes by Nina Sankovitch
The reading of great books awaken and brightens the light of my soul. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
Great Books quotes by Lailah Gifty Akita
Wisdom is not to be found in the art of oratory, or in great books, but in a withdrawal from these sensible things and in a turning to the most simple and infinite forms. You will learn how to receive it into a temple purged from all vice, and by fervent love to cling to it until you may taste it and see how sweet That is which is all sweetness. Once this has been tasted, all things which you now consider as important will appear as vile, and you will be so humbled that no arrogance or other vice will remain in you. Once having tasted this wisdom, you will inseparably adhere to it with a chaste and pure heart. You will choose rather to forsake this world and all else that is not of this wisdom, and living with unspeakable happiness you will die. ~ Nicolaus Cusanus
Great Books quotes by Nicolaus Cusanus
Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards. ~ Martin Amis
Great Books quotes by Martin Amis
Success is not measured by bestseller lists. Certain types of great books sell very well; other types of great books don't sell a lot. But they're both great. ~ Po Bronson
Great Books quotes by Po Bronson
Sometimes books feel like the only thing that keep her sane. Actually, she knows that they're the only reason she's still even vaguely okay right now. That's what she clings to: reading great books and seeing great films and, for as long as she's immersed in them, being able to forget, if only for a short time, about the reality of her life. ~ Steph Bowe
Great Books quotes by Steph Bowe
Meditation has been really helpful for me and music and great books. Deep down, it's just that I feel a connection to music and books when I can find that other people have gone through similar things. ~ Mason Jennings
Great Books quotes by Mason Jennings
To read great books does not mean one becomes 'bookish'; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance. ~ John Cowper Powys
Great Books quotes by John Cowper Powys
Still, I'm lucky: I feast on solitude, I will never miss the crowd. I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me. I sit in bed and wait for the whole thing to go one way or the other. just like everybody else. ~ Charles Bukowski
Great Books quotes by Charles Bukowski
Every artist wants his work to be permanent. But what is? The Aswan Dam covered some of the greatest art in the world. Venice is sinking. Great books and pictures were lost in the Florence floods. In the meantime we still enjoy butterflies. ~ Romare Bearden
Great Books quotes by Romare Bearden
Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable. ~ Julian Barnes
Great Books quotes by Julian Barnes
Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them. ~ Bret Easton Ellis
Great Books quotes by Bret Easton Ellis
The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just. ~ Anita Brookner
Great Books quotes by Anita Brookner
The main danger is that of supposing that the thing to do is get a mind on the scale of Thomas (Aquinas)'s into your head, a task of compression that will be achieved only at your head's peril. The only safe thing to do is to find a way of getting your mind into his, wherein yours has room to expand and grow, and explore the worlds his contains. ~ Denys Turner
Great Books quotes by Denys Turner
Great literature, obviously, could not rescue anyone from so grievous a fore-shortening of perspective. It was naïve and false on my part to think that the stu-dents would be rescued by Western classics. I knew perfectly well that great books work on our souls only over time, as they are mixed with experience and transformed by memory and desire and many other books, great and small. At some time later, the perception of a 'choice between freedom and sex' would dis-solve into absurdity. But for a while, the idea worked its mischief. ~ David Denby
Great Books quotes by David Denby
look, and I'm sure you'll be amazed at the wealth of great books - usually there are several hundred freebies in virtually every category of fiction and nonfiction, every day of the year. And these aren't just the ~ Steve Weber
Great Books quotes by Steve Weber
There is the myth that writing books for children is easier than writing books for grownups, whereas we know that truly great books for children are works of genius, whether it's 'Alice in Wonderland' or the 'Gruffalo' or 'Northern Lights.' When it's a great book, it's a great book, whether it's for children or not. ~ Michael Morpurgo
Great Books quotes by Michael Morpurgo
The great writings interact with one another. They cannot be read in isolation.. ~ Richard J. Foster
Great Books quotes by Richard J. Foster
A sincere man who sits down at night and pens that which his soul believes to be right, that which his soul tells him will be good for humanity, is exercising a power over the world that is beneficial. We should hail that expression of greatness, of goodness, with thanksgiving. But the insincere man, the man who will sit down at night and distort facts, who will wilfully misrepresent truth, who is a traitor to the divine within him which is calling, nay longing for truth, what shall we say of that man? He is publishing falsehoods to the world, giving poison to young, innocent souls who are longing for truth. Oh, there is no condemnation too strong for the hypocrite, for the betrayer of Christ. We will not condemn him, but God will, in His justice; He must.

Too much time is taken up by our young people, and by our older ones, too, in reading useless pamphlets, useless books; "It is worse than useless," says Farrar, in that excellent little work on "Great Books:". . . .

Men in Israel, it is time that we take a stand against vile literature. It is poisonous to the soul. It is the duty of a parent to put the poison, that is in the house, on the highest shelf, away from that innocent little child who knows not the danger of it. It is the duty of the parent also to keep the boy's mind from becoming polluted with the vile trash that is sometimes scattered--nay, that is daily distributed among us. There is inconsistency in a man's kneeling down with his family i ~ David O. McKay
Great Books quotes by David O. McKay
The truly great books are flawed: The Brothers Karamazov is unwieldy in structure; a present-day editor would probably want to cut the Grand Inquisitor scene because it isn't necessary to the plot. For me The Brothers Karamazov is one of the greatest novels ever written, and this is perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, its human faults. ~ Madeleine L'Engle
Great Books quotes by Madeleine L'Engle
I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen. ~ Augusten Burroughs
Great Books quotes by Augusten Burroughs
With the Holocaust - I wonder if a lot of Jewish writers of my generation have felt this way - it feels really intimidating to approach it. I feel like so many writers who have either lived through it firsthand or were part of that generation where they were closer to the people who were in it have written so beautifully about it, so there's no lack of great books about it ~ Molly Antopol
Great Books quotes by Molly Antopol
Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable ~ Oscar Wilde
Great Books quotes by Oscar Wilde
Books never make religions, but religions make books. We must not forget that. No book ever created God, but God inspired all the great books. And no book ever created a soul. ~ Swami Vivekananda
Great Books quotes by Swami Vivekananda
He said that the principal function of music was to organize the details into harmonies that were intended to make us forget that there was randomness all around us. The same, he said, could be said for great books. ~ Selden Edwards
Great Books quotes by Selden Edwards
Making really great music, making really great films, writing great books is an antidote to all of that. And, as people, as artists, some of the massive disruption that technology is causing is so exciting, the way that people can share creativity now. ~ Edward Norton
Great Books quotes by Edward Norton
There are great books in this world and great worlds in books. ~ Anne Bronte
Great Books quotes by Anne Bronte
I had another reason for seeking Him, for trying to espy His face, a professional one. God and literature are conflated in my mind. Why this is, I'm not sure. Perhaps because great books seem heavensent. Perhaps because I know that each nove is a puny but very valiant attempt at godlike behavior. Perhaps because there is no difference between the finest poetry and most transcendent mysticism. Perhaps because writers like Thomas Merton, who are able to enter the realm of the spirit and come away with fine, lucid prose. Perhaps because of more secular writers, like John Steinbeck, whose every passage, it seems to me, peals with religiousity and faith. It once occured to me that literature - all art really - is either talking to people about God, or talking to God about people. ~ Paul Quarrington
Great Books quotes by Paul Quarrington
I already optioned a book called The Personal History of Rachel DuPree. I also like The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. And I love all of Octavia Butler's books. She's created some very complicated black heroines with a variety of belief systems. There are many great books out there, but those are a few of the ones that stand out. ~ Viola Davis
Great Books quotes by Viola Davis
Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose. ~ Matthew Specktor
Great Books quotes by Matthew Specktor
What can be the meaning of that emphatic exclamation?" cried he. "Do you consider the forms of introduction, and the stress that is laid on them, as nonsense? I cannot quite agree with you there. What say you, Mary? For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books and make extracts. ~ Jane Austen
Great Books quotes by Jane Austen
A towering theoretical achievement of exceptional elegance ... Like most great books, Sociobiology is unpedantic, lucid, and eminently accessible. ~ Pierre L. Van Den Berghe
Great Books quotes by Pierre L. Van Den Berghe
The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time. ~ Mortimer J. Adler
Great Books quotes by Mortimer J. Adler
Everybody is different. Some writers can write reams of great books and then J. D. Salinger wrote just a few. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies. They were all phenomenal. Mozart wrote some 40 symphonies, and they were all phenomenal. That doesn't mean Beethoven was a lesser writer, it's just some guys are capable of more productivity, some guys take more time. ~ Billy Joel
Great Books quotes by Billy Joel
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