Light
- The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
-- Matthew Arnold
- Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Light is the symbol of truth.
-- James Russell Lowell
- There are two kinds of light--the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.
-- James Thurber
Listening
- The ear is something we cannot close at will, and we are the poorer for it.
-- E. Brian
- We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.
-- Diogenes
- The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- No man would listen to you talk if he did not know that it was his turn next.
-- Edgar Watson Howe
- Take care what you say before a wall, as you cannot tell who may be behind it.
-- Sa'di
Literature
- Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.
-- George Ade
- Literature is a power to be possessed, not a body of objects to be studied.
-- Anon.
- Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child.
-- Anon.
- The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
-- Margaret Atwood
- 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
- 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
- A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.
-- Albert Camus
- Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
-- G. K. Chesterton
- Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
-- Cyril Connolly
- Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- I can find my biography in every fable that I read.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with bad.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The walls are the publishers of the poor.
-- Eduardo Galeano
- Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
-- André Gide
- The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.
-- Richard Hughes
- The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.
-- Aldous Huxley
- In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.
-- Aldous Huxley
- Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.
-- Dean William R. Inge
- The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.
-- Samuel Johnson
- Literature is my utopia.
-- Helen Keller
- The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
-- Stephen Leacock
- Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children; and life is the other way around.
-- David Lodge
- A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.
-- Don Marquis
- In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others.
-- Andre Maurois
- A great literature is chiefly the product of inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
-- H.L. Mencken
- Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
-- Ezra Pound
- Literature is news that stays news.
-- Ezra Pound
- Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
-- Jules Renard
- Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse.
-- Joseph Roux
- The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.
-- Muriel Rukeyser
- A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
-- Stendhal
- Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
-- Mark Twain
- Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
-- Jessamyn West
- Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
-- Thornton Wilder
- Literature is the immortality of speech.
-- August Wilhelm von Schlegel
- Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
-- Thornton Wilder
Logic
- 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
- Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.
-- Lord Dunsany
- 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
- Logic: an instrument used for bolstering a prejudice.
-- Elbert Hubbard
- Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.
-- Benjamin Jowett
- Logic is the anatomy of thought.
-- John Locke
- Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
- The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
-- Bernard de Voto
Loneliness
- Separate we come, and separate we go,
And this be it known, is all that we know.
-- Conrad Aiken
- 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
- People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.
-- Anton Checkov
- So lonely 'twas that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- 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
- The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
-- Norman Cousins
- What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
-- George Eliot
- In cities no one is quiet but many are lonely; in the country, people are quiet but few are lonely.
-- Geoffrey Francis Fisher
- I was never less alone than when by myself.
-- Edward Gibbon
- 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
- People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.
-- Joseph F. Newton
- The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.
-- Friedrich Nietszche
- Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.
-- Eugene O'Neill
- To be adult is to be alone.
-- Jean Rostand
- Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
-- Mother Teresa
- 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
- Be good and you will be lonely.
-- Mark Twain
- One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
-- Vincent van Gogh
- The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
-- Thomas Wolfe
- 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
- Loquacity and lying are cousins.
-- German Proverb
- He who talks much cannot talk well.
-- Carlo Goldoni
- Every absurdity has a champion to defend it, for error is always talkative.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
- They always talk who never think, and who have the least to say.
-- Matthew Prior
- Speaking much is a sign of vanity, for he that is lavish with words is a niggard in deed.
-- Sir Walter Raleigh
- No fool can be silent at a feast.
-- Solon
- Loquacity storms the ear, but modesty takes the heart.
-- Robert South
Loss
- When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.
-- German Motto
- It's the good loser who finally loses out.
-- Kin Hubbard
- The cheerful loser is the winner.
-- Elbert Hubbard
- 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
- Wise men never sit and wail their loss, but cheerily seek how to redress their harms.
-- William Shakespeare
- Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
-- Richard Whately
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