Great Lit Quotes

...America went off the track somewhere--back around the time of the Civil War, or pretty soon afterwards. Instead of going ahead and developing along the line in which the country started out, it got shunted off in another direction...Suddenly we realize that America has turned into something ugly...and the worst of it is the intellectual dishonesty which all this corruption has bred...People are afraid to think straight--afraid to face themselves...We've become like a nation of advertising men, all hiding behind catch phrases like "prosperity" and "rugged individualism" and "the American way." And the real things like freedom, and equal opportunity and the integrity and worth of the individual...they have become just words too. ~ Thomas Wolfe

There's more of a family connection when you're working on a TV show. That's not to say that you don't make great connections when you're working on films, but it's different unless you're there working every day. ~ Simon Baker

The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who, in the middle of great wealth, are starving spiritually. ~ Martin Seligman

great failing is "to see yourself as more than you are and to value yourself at less than your true worth." A ~ Ryan Holiday

... and do you know what?"
"What?"
"People don't talk about anything."
"Oh, they must!"
"No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else. And most of the time in the caves they have the joke boxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the colored patterns running up and down, but it's only color and all abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That's all there is now. My uncle says it was different once. A long time back sometimes pictures said things or even showed people. ~ Ray Bradbury

The strange thing was that you felt such a great sense of affection, not for anything or for anyone, but the fullness of what may be called love. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Working with big actors and realising that they were just normal people who've got an incredible talent was just a great experience. ~ Tom Felton

The great enemy of achievement is a schedule already full. ~ Robert Breault

Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would. ~ Fay Weldon

Night landings were a routine part of carrier operations - and perhaps the best of all examples of how a man's accumulated good works did him no good whatsoever at each new step up the great pyramid, of how each new step was an absolute test, and of how each bright new day's absolutes - chosen or damned - were built into the routine. ~ Tom Wolfe

No man can do a great and enduring work for God who is not a man of prayer, and no man can be a man of prayer who does not give much time to praying. ~ Edward McKendree Bounds

Xearn.com is a great place to create a mock portfolio. ~ Gregory Bresiger

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human. ~ Keira Knightley

A proof of really great art is that it is generally true - it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

You could make a feature about the world of tickling. You could include female ticklers and you could find out why people are ticklish, but I don't think it would be a great documentary, when you're spending 90 minutes just finding out about the physiology and psychology of tickling. ~ David Farrier

From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan, every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner, I think, if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next. ~ Jon Meacham

I started freelancing for the Associated Press. I had a great mentor there who sort of taught me everything. ~ Lynsey Addario

China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust. ~ Rose George

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it. ~ Jules Renard

The danger chiefly lies in acting well; no crime's so great as daring to excel. ~ Charles Churchill

By depending on the great, The small may rise high. See: the little plant ascending the tall tree Has climbed to the top. ~ Saskya Pandita

My personal life is as monotonous as ever; but they have given me permission to walk in the garden, where there are almost seventeen trees ! This is a great happiness for me. Moreover, I am given a candle in the evenings - that's my second piece of luck. The third will be mine if you answer as soon as possible, and send me the next number of the 0. Z. I am in the same position as a country subscriber, and await each number as a great event, like some landed proprietor dying of boredom in the provinces. Will you send me some historical works ? That would be splendid. But best of all would be the Bible (both Testaments). I need one. Should it prove possible, send it in a French translation. But if you could add as well a Slav edition, it would be the height of bliss. Of ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

One loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps. ~ W.B.Yeats

I'm also not an avid watcher of the show ['Walking Dead'] for no good reason. I think it's obviously a great show. I think it's a good comparison [to "Zoo"], because it is this apocalyptic world we're living in Season 2 of "Zoo." ~ James Wolk

What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The color of the mountains is Buddha's body; the sound of running water is his great speech. ~ Dogen

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Most great advances have been a collaboration. That is the joy of science for me. ~ Tim Hunt

His knees were held together by the skin-tight trousers, which consequently narrowed the aperture through which great quantities of malodorous, rancid dreck were shortly to emerge with great force. St John knew that this was likely to prove troublesome. Although his mid-morning bab was usually undertaken in a more perfunctory manner, he would still have been mindful enough to ensure that his trousers were well below the knee before he commenced the disagreeable act, but in his current predicament, he was in no state to dally. ~ St John Morris

Don't argue for other people's weaknesses. Don't argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it / immediately. ~ Stephen R. Covey

Great services are not canceled by one act or by one single error. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

I really feel like my goal, and I don't always achieve it, is to do the best work I can do, and stay out of the results. Because ultimately, the result is not what the work is about. There are other people whose jobs are to focus on those results and maximize them, and that's great. Let them do their job. ~ Alan Ball

About things you merely like? Would you rather learn how to plant a garden, work with friends to paint a house, or just have a great day with ~ Barbara Sher

Great times are great softeners ~ Ryan Holiday

Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living. ~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Even in an advanced stage of civilization, there is always a tendency to prefer those parts of literature which favor ancient prejudices, rather than those which oppose them; and in cases where this tendency is very strong, the only effect of great learning will be to supply the materials which may corroborate old errors and confirm old superstitions. In our time such instances are not uncommon; and we frequently meet with men whose erudition ministers to their ignorance, and who, the more they read the less they know. ~ Henry Thomas Buckle

I love technology. Matches, to light a fire, is really high tech. The wheel is really one of the great inventions of all time. Other than that, I am an ignoramus about technology. ~ William Shatner

Such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide ~ Enrico Fermi

There's something about Betty, like she's a great big empty space waiting to suck in trouble. There'll always be a story.... One of these days Betty's going to get up and find a line of starving Africans outside her door. You can depend on it. ~ Laurie Graham

We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account. ~ T. S. Eliot

To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education. ~ John Buchan

At the Minsk tractor factory I was looking for a woman who had served in the army as a sniper. She had been a famous sniper. The newspapers from the front had written about her more than once. Her Moscow girlfriends gave me her home phone number, but it was old. And the last name I had noted down was her maiden name. I went to the factory where I knew she worked in the personnel department, and I heard from the men (the director of the factory and the head of the personnel department): "Aren't there enough men? What do you need these women's stories for? Women's fantasies…" The men were afraid that women would tell about some wrong sort of war. I visited a family…Both husband and wife had fought. They met at the front and got married there: "We celebrated our wedding in the trench. Before the battle. I made a white dress for myself out of a German parachute." He had been a machine gunner, she a radio operator. The man immediately sent his wife to the kitchen: "Prepare something for us." The kettle was already boiling, and the sandwiches were served, she sat down with us, but the husband immediately got her to her feet again: "Where are the strawberries? Where are our treats from the country?" After my repeated requests, he reluctantly relinquished his place, saying: "Tell it the way I taught you. Without tears and women's trifles: how you wanted to be beautiful, how you wept when they cut off your braid." Later she whispered to me: "He studied The History of the Great Patriot ~ Svetlana Alexievich