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    Light

  1. The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
       -- Matthew Arnold

  2. Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.
       -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

  3. Light is the symbol of truth.
       -- James Russell Lowell

  4. There are two kinds of light--the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.
       -- James Thurber


    Listening

  5. The ear is something we cannot close at will, and we are the poorer for it.
       -- E. Brian

  6. We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.
       -- Diogenes

  7. The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.
       -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

  8. No man would listen to you talk if he did not know that it was his turn next.
       -- Edgar Watson Howe

  9. Take care what you say before a wall, as you cannot tell who may be behind it.
       -- Sa'di


    Literature

  10. Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.
       -- George Ade

  11. Literature is a power to be possessed, not a body of objects to be studied.
       -- Anon.

  12. Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child.
       -- Anon.

  13. The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
       -- Margaret Atwood

  14. When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.
       -- Edwin Bourdet

  15. I am never long, even in the society of her I love, without yearning for the company of my lamp and my library.
       -- Lord Byron

  16. A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.
       -- Albert Camus

  17. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
       -- G. K. Chesterton

  18. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
       -- Cyril Connolly

  19. Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.
       -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

  20. I can find my biography in every fable that I read.
       -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

  21. People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with bad.
       -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

  22. The walls are the publishers of the poor.
       -- Eduardo Galeano

  23. Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
       -- André Gide

  24. The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
       -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  25. All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.
       -- Richard Hughes

  26. The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.
       -- Aldous Huxley

  27. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.
       -- Aldous Huxley

  28. Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.
       -- Dean William R. Inge

  29. The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.
       -- Samuel Johnson

  30. Literature is my utopia.
       -- Helen Keller

  31. The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
       -- Stephen Leacock

  32. Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children; and life is the other way around.
       -- David Lodge

  33. A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.
       -- Don Marquis

  34. In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others.
       -- Andre Maurois

  35. A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
       -- H.L. Mencken

  36. Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
       -- Ezra Pound

  37. Literature is news that stays news.
       -- Ezra Pound

  38. Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
       -- Jules Renard

  39. Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse.
       -- Joseph Roux

  40. The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.
       -- Muriel Rukeyser

  41. A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
       -- Stendhal

  42. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
       -- Mark Twain

  43. Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
       -- Jessamyn West

  44. Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
       -- Thornton Wilder

  45. Literature is the immortality of speech.
       -- August Wilhelm von Schlegel

  46. Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
       -- Thornton Wilder


    Logic

  47. Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.
       -- John Dewey

  48. Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.
       -- Lord Dunsany

  49. Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.
       -- William E Gladstone

  50. Logic: an instrument used for bolstering a prejudice.
       -- Elbert Hubbard

  51. Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.
       -- Benjamin Jowett

  52. Logic is the anatomy of thought.
       -- John Locke

  53. Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.
       -- Joseph Wood Krutch

  54. The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
       -- Bernard de Voto


    Loneliness

  55. Separate we come, and separate we go,
    And this be it known, is all that we know.
       -- Conrad Aiken

  56. Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
       -- Francis Bacon

  57. People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.
       -- Anton Checkov

  58. So lonely 'twas that God himself
    Scarce seemed there to be.
       -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  59. Who knows what true loneliness is -- not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
       -- Joseph Conrad

  60. The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
       -- Norman Cousins

  61. What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
       -- George Eliot

  62. In cities no one is quiet but many are lonely; in the country, people are quiet but few are lonely.
       -- Geoffrey Francis Fisher

  63. I was never less alone than when by myself.
       -- Edward Gibbon

  64. Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell.
       -- Edna St. Vincent Millay

  65. People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.
       -- Joseph F. Newton

  66. The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.
       -- Friedrich Nietszche

  67. Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.
       -- Eugene O'Neill

  68. To be adult is to be alone.
       -- Jean Rostand

  69. Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
       -- Mother Teresa

  70. Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
       -- Paul Tillich

  71. Be good and you will be lonely.
       -- Mark Twain

  72. One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
       -- Vincent van Gogh

  73. The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
       -- Thomas Wolfe

  74. The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
       -- Thomas Wolfe


    Loquacity

  75. Loquacity and lying are cousins.
       -- German Proverb

  76. He who talks much cannot talk well.
       -- Carlo Goldoni

  77. Every absurdity has a champion to defend it, for error is always talkative.
       -- Oliver Goldsmith

  78. They always talk who never think, and who have the least to say.
       -- Matthew Prior

  79. Speaking much is a sign of vanity, for he that is lavish with words is a niggard in deed.
       -- Sir Walter Raleigh

  80. No fool can be silent at a feast.
       -- Solon

  81. Loquacity storms the ear, but modesty takes the heart.
       -- Robert South


    Loss

  82. When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.
       -- German Motto

  83. It's the good loser who finally loses out.
       -- Kin Hubbard

  84. The cheerful loser is the winner.
       -- Elbert Hubbard

  85. No evil is without its compensation. The less money, the less trouble; the less favor, the less envy. Even in those cases which put us out of wits, it is not the loss itself, but the estimate of the loss that troubles us.
       -- Seneca

  86. Wise men never sit and wail their loss, but cheerily seek how to redress their harms.
       -- William Shakespeare

  87. Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
       -- Richard Whately


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