c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I believe in roses. And I believe in putting roses into a vase and sitting the vase on the table. I believe in getting lost and being found, I believe in going barefoot, and in laughter! My religion is to laugh at myself, whenever I can! I believe in the sunlight and in grey skies with big, beautiful clouds!
— C. JoyBell C.
But Tik Tok believes everything's circular, including men and women. He says nature seems to go around and around, and that we all have bits of everything.
— Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
[Buddhism and Christianity] are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual and intellectual man sees it as sort of dilemma; a very hard and terrible choice. There is little else on earth that can compare with these for completeness. And he who does not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha.
— G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas
Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change
— Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
Lulled by stupefying illusions, the world is asleep in the cradle of infancy, dreaming away the hours.
— Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
If God does not exist, everything is permitted.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Hope is a fire more ravenous than the flames of temptation.  For if only a portion of it poisons your veins, it is enough to make you stand against ridiculous odds again and again and again.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss.
— Cesar Nascimento
The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning.
— Peter Høeg, Tales of the Night
I'm on a diet I plan to lose Guilt, Fear, Sin, and Doubt then I'll be confident enough to walk about.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Return to Stantasyland
He is not a punishing God, Lizzy. That is the mistake most people make, thinking He sits with an account book and a big fist, waiting to punish us. He is not a wrathful God but a loving God who made each of us and loved us since we were in our mother’s womb
— Ann Rinaldi, The Staircase
What sets science and the law apart from religion is that nothing is expected to be taken on faith. We're encouraged to ask whether the evidence actually supports what we're being told - or what we grew up believing - and we're allowed to ask whether we're hearing all the evidence or just some small prejudicial part of it. If our beliefs aren't supported by the evidence, then we're encouraged to alter our beliefs.
— Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It
That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.
— Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
Fear comes when faith left.
— Zai
Never hold a belief longer than you can hold your breath.
— Marty Rubin
We all need something to believe in. Without those beliefs we're just floating particles moving through the space time continuum.
— Solange nicole
Leaders don't correct people to success as much as believe them to it.
— Orrin Woodward
...eating is the purest mode of consumption. Our purchases are statements about our social class, our friends, and our beliefs. Buying something as continually necessary as food is an ongoing act of self-definition.
— Evan D.G. Fraser
Strange, is it not, how even those of us who scoff at divine intervention will fall to our knees and clasp our hands the moment we realize our futures are defined by uncertainty and hazard. A thoughtful man would never leave his knees. A wise man would never drop to them. In any case, it wasn’t really a prayer, but one does like to follow convention now and then.
— Andrew Levkoff, A Mixture of Madness
Matter would have the universe a uniform dispersion, motionless, complete. Spirit would have an earth, a heaven and a hell, whirl and conflict, an incandescent sun to drive away the dark, to illuminate good and evil, would have thought, memory, desire, would build a stairway of forms increasing in complexity, inclusiveness, to a heaven ever receding above, changing always in configuration, becoming when reached but the way to more distant heavens, the last . . . but there is no last, for spirit tends upward without end, wanders, spirals, dips, but tends ever upward, ruthlessly using lower forms to create higher forms, moving toward ever greater inwardness, consciousness, spontaneity, to an ever greater freedom.
— Allen Wheelis
And so, let me repeat: who wants to believe - let them believe. But I do not want to believe, I want to know.
— K. Borun
Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.
— Hypatia
Some people will tell you werewolves can only shapechange under a full moon, but people also say there's no such things as ghosts.
— Patricia Briggs, Moon Called
One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.
— John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.
— Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God
Also I didn't habe 20/20 vision whch you needed to be a pilot. But I said you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.
— Joe Abercrombie, Red Country
No one should be surprised at the difficulty of faith, if there is some part of his life where he is consciously resisting or disobeying the commandment of Jesus. Is there some part of your life which you are refusing to surrender at his behest, some sinful passion, maybe, or some animosity, some hope, perhaps your ambition or your reason? ... How can you hope to enter into communion with him when at some point in your life you are running away from him?
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
She smiled thoughtfully. “I think Jackson was like a lost puppy. He needed purpose, someone to believe in him and love him despite his bullshit. But he didn’t have that, so he just went around humping everyone’s leg and peeing everywhere. Then you came along and he thought he found that owner that would give him that purpose—something that would make him feel needed—but you chose the fancy pet store puppy instead, so he went back to peeing on everything and destroying all the furniture.”“Um, Whit...is there a point to this?”“We all need someone to believe in us. It helps us see our full potential. You were that someone to believe in him. I think he’ll be a new man because of it.” “So you’re saying I rescued a lost puppy, and now he’ll become a topnotch show dog because I’m just so amazing?”“Exactly.”“You have such an eloquent way with words.”“No shit, right?”“Precisely.”-Emma and Whitney
— Rachael Wade, Love and Relativity
Making this a better world happens one person at a time. You cannot force your beliefs on anyone. Rather, be the example that others can emulate. Live your life so that others may be inspired by your words and deeds. That's how change happens.
— Tom Giaquinto, Be A Good Human
In answer to modern requests for signs and wonders, Our Lord might say, 'You repeat Satan's temptation, whenever you admire the wonders of science, and forget that I am the Author of the Universe and its science. Your scientists are the proofreaders, but not the authors of the Book of Nature; they can see and examine My handiwork, but they cannot create one atom themselves. You would tempt Me to prove Myself omnipotent by meaningless tests...You tempt Me after you have willfully destroyed your own cities with bombs by shrieking out, "Why does God not stop this war?" You tempt Me, saying that I have no power, unless I show it at your beck and call. This, if you remember, is exactly how Satan tempted Me in the desert.I have never had many followers on the lofty heights of Divine truth, I know; for instance, I have hardly had the intelligentsia. I refuse to perform stunts to win them, for they would not really be won that way. It is only when I am seen on the Cross that I really draw men to Myself; it is by sacrifice, and not by marvels, that I must make My appeal. I must win followers not with test tubes, but with My blood; not with material power, but with love; not with celestial fireworks, but with the right use of reason and free will.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ
Scholars discern motions of history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts and virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Master Palaemon's hand, dry and wrinkled as a mummy's, groped until it found mine. "Among the initiates of religion it is said, 'You are an epopt always.' The reference is not only to knowledge but to their chrism, whose mark, being invisible, is ineradicable. You know our chrism."I nodded again."Less even than theirs can it be washed away. Should you leave now, men will only say, 'He was nurtured by the torturers.' But when you have been anointed they will say, 'He is a torturer.' You may follow the plow or the drum, but still you will hear, 'He is a torturer.' Do you understand that?
— Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
I sigh. “But if you’d talked to Jules—if she could hear you . . .” My voice trails off.“Then you wouldn’t feel quite so crazy?” Oliver asks gently. “Can’t you believe in me, if I believe in you?
— Jodi Picoult, Between the Lines
Open your mind to the infinite possibilities that exist for you. Born through your dreams, crystallised into form by your desires, given impetus by your expectations, then made real through your beliefs.
— Steven Redhead, Keys to The Laws of Creation
It doesn't matter what Church you belong to. If you don't believe in yourself you're Already Damned
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
The beliefs you hold strongly in your mind will become your dreams and in time become your reality.
— Steven Redhead, The Solution
I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows
Belief is the magic key that unlocks your dreams.
— Orrin Woodward, LIFE
Belief driven by determination is one key factor governing whether what you pursue becomes real or not.
— Steven Redhead, The Solution
A banal mysticism, which is so banal that all the mysticism seems to have evaporated long ago, binds 'us' to the homeland - that special place which is more than a place, more than a geophysical area.
— Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism
If I say I do not believe in faeries or elves or trolls, does this imply that I have a set of beliefs and a lifestyle that adheres to this lack of belief? NO, IT ONLY IMPLIES that I do not believe in faeries, elves and trolls. So one cannot extrapolate morality, philosophy, cosmology, character, political party, or any other thing of that sort from the mere lack of belief in one other thing.
— Kelli Jae Baeli, Supernatural Hypocrisy: The Cognitive Dissonance of a God Cosmology
A persons soul reflects more than just their actions. It reflects their thoughts and feelings, their emotions and desires. It reflected all of who you are.
— Jamie Canosa, Temptation
I love Religion it's the cheapest place to buy Guilt, Fear,Sin and Doubt
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
Willadee asked him if he thought maybe it should say HAPPY EVER AFTER, but Samuel said no, he thought happiness was like any other miracle. The more you talked about it, the less people believed it was real. It was like Swan said, some things, everybody just had to find out about for themselves.
— Jenny Wingfield, The Homecoming of Samuel Lake
Jesus is a descendant of David, the beloved of God. Jesus is the only begotten Son of God who was born into this world and died and rose again. Saint John calls him the Word and the Light. When he died, he did so as atonement for our sins, and when he rose, he did so to defeat the power and curse of death and hell on this once-holy world. Do you believe in him?
— David  Holdsworth, Angelos
If a Manx cat tells you that it is trying to preserve its long, beautiful tail, you don't have to believe it - especially if you have eyes.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
Most Religions are Social Clubs with expensive Entertainment Cheap Wine and Stale Crackers
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Return to Stantasyland
You were gullible," he said. And then, "When you were really little, you hated carrots. You wouldn't eat them. But then I told you that if you ate carrots, you'd get X-ray vision. And you believed me. You believed everything I said." I did. I really did. I believed him when he said that carrots could give me X-ray vision. I believed him when he told me that he'd never cared about me. And then, later that night, when he tried to take it back, I guess I believed him again. Now I didn't know what to believe. I just knew I didn't believe in him anymore.
— Jenny Han, We'll Always Have Summer
I want to be a woman who lives totally abandoned to the first commandment: to love my Lord, my God, with all my heart. I don’t want the reputation that I love God, I don’t want to write songs about loving God, I don’t want to talk about loving God. I want to actually love God. When I close my eyes, I want my heart to move. When I close my eyes and I look at Him, I want to feel alive on the inside. I want to look at Him with a fire in my heart and it’s real.
— Misty Edwards
At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.
— Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
I wrote: 'Do you really not believe in love?'I really wished I never would have asked.'No', she had written back. 'I believe people become infatuated; maybe they even really like each other. But I don't believe in love. Those kinds of feelings just don't last. You feel them for a while, maybe even a few years, but eventually the feeling goes away.
— Keary Taylor, What I Didn't Say
Their position seems to be that their God is so great he doesn't even have to exist.
— Carl Sagan, Contact
You're worth so much more than anything I can give you. If you can't believe that right now, believe in me.
— C.J. Redwine
People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.
— Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle
You can’t become who you’re supposed to be if you keep looking back on what might have been.” - Alexis
— Candace Knoebel
Can a man change the stars?" "Yes William. If he believes enough, a man can do anything!
— A Knights Tale
Lord Jesus, don't let me lie when I say that I love you...and protect me, for today I could betray you.
— Augustine of Hippo
You are everything you should be, and all that is enough. Be proud of who you are, and love who you will become.” – Lady Lalaigne to Nhakira, “Chosen
— Jeanine Henning Nhakira
Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn't require much of anything at all.
— Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary
You’re so eager to jump into something you’ve barely begun to understand. Things don’t just get handed to you. You have to fight. Prove that you are worthy and then maybe the answers will be found." - Mr. Creepy
— Candace Knoebel
I am an agnostic on most matters of faith, but on the subject of maps I have always been a true believer. It is on the map, therefore it is, and I am.
— Tony Horwitz, One for the Road: An Outback Adventure
You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe until the event. Until it's too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble
— Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
Atheist’s denial of God’s existence needs just as much substantiation as does the theist’s claim
—  the atheist must give plausible reasons for rejecting God’s existence.
In some cases, I am able to respect what so many call bigots. Such people have a more solid foundation for drawing their lines when it comes to the security of their ways and quite possibly the security of mankind. They rely on something that has worked to get man this far without placing ideals blindly driven by emotion first; they have a sure line and they say, 'No.' That, in a sense, is something I find to be highly respectable.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
I write-down to speak-up.
— M.K. Asante Jr.
Belief is the strongest power you can bring to bear in order to realise your dreams.
— Steven Redhead, The Solution
I believed our touching to be more intense because of it's very holding back. Belief is always a choice.
— Jane Green, Dune Road
The very fact of having fixed conclusions to strive for in orthodox belief does not render the Christian philosopher dogmatic but rather intellectually fruitful, willing to take and follow reason further than the putatively undogmatic unbelieving philosopher
— Gregory B. Sadler
God lives in the peaks and valleys, the jarring transitions, not in the mundane, the safe, the smooth, or the repetitive. But that means there must be at least a certain amount of dissonance. Without dissonance, there is no need of belief, and without belief there surely is no God.
— Neil Abramson, Unsaid
It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.
— Kingsley Amis, The Green Man
I was raised to believe that God speaks in the language of sacrifice," he told me, "You are expected to sacrifice because it is the measure of the depth of your belief...
— Neil Abramson
Such is the facility with which mankind believe at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another, and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths, any consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings, that multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an Omnipotent Author of Hell, and have nevertheless identified that being with the one best conception they were able to form of perfect goodness.
— John Stuart Mill
Belief compelled through fear is not belief, it is blind and forced obedience.
— Carlton D. Pearson, God Is Not a Christian, Nor a Jew, Muslim, Hindu...: God Dwells with Us, in Us, Around Us, as Us
We can think only of creatures, of things He's made. Creatures are all we know, and can be all we know until we know Him. When we think of Him like that, we find we can't believe. He can't be like a creature any more than a carpenter is like a table.
— Gene Wolfe, The Wizard
An audience that is unwilling to suspend its own presuppositions and biases while considering an opposed (or even unopposed) viewpoint not only frustrates the function of extended argument but effectively denies its own beliefs a rational basis.
— Vincent E. Barry
And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.
— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
A man lives by believing something
—  not by debating and arguing about many things.
What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Do not desire chiefly to be cherished and consoled by God; desire above all to love Him.Do not anxiously desire to have others find consolation in God, but rather help them to love God.Do not seek consolation in talking about God, but speak of Him in order that He may be glorified.If you truly love Him, nothing can console you but His glory. And if you seek His glory before everything else, then you will also be humble enough to receive consolation from His hand: accepting it chiefly because, in showing His mercy to us, He is glorified in our souls.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
Science is agnostic when it comes to God - not atheistic, as some people prefer to read that laden word wrongly - just agnostic.
— Eric Chaisson, Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos
The wise man has struggled to find You in his wisdom, and he has failed. The just man has striven to grasp You in his own justice, and he has gone astray.But the sinner, suddenly struck by the lightning of mercy that ought to have been justice, falls down in adoration of Your holiness: for he had seen what kings desired to see and never saw, what prophets foretold and never gazed upon, what the men of ancient times grew weary of expecting when they died. He has seen that Your love is so infinitely good that it cannot be the object of a human bargain.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
The more you believe, the more you doubt. The more you doubt, the more you ask questions. Knowing that questions left unanswered is the best proof for your belief.
— Sandra Chami Kassis
There is a kind of truth in everything, even fairytales. In fact, especially in fairytales... The King understood it as he looked out from the roof of the Temple and saw the clouds flying past and the green fields far beneath him. He knew that some things are real whether you believe in them or not...(The Thirteenth King)
— Elizabeth Hopkinson
We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him. We forget this need when we take a self-sufficient pleasure in our own good works. The poor and helpless are the first to find Him, Who came to seek and to save that which was lost.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
For a moment we sit in silence. Eventually, I turn to him and say, "Do you believe in God?" His eyes narrow for a moment and he stares at me at me for a while. Stares in a rather intense way, like a doctor looking at a troubling X-ray. Then he looks out the and says in a voice like shattered glass, "Only in storms.
— Rebecca Sparrow, The Year Nick McGowan Came to Stay
Do you believe in magic?Tell me if you doI believe in magicHow about you?
— Victoria Zigler
He believes, but he does not believe: the impossibility of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full of weeping for a child to understand.
— Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
That was the trouble with formulating a system: what could you do but repeat it?
— Peter Washington
Nevertheless, should you have any doubts that we are stating sound doctrines, look up the references and see exactly what the Bible says and believe it in preference to any man. You cannot go wrong with this kind of advice. But in doing this, be sure you adhere to what is written, and that you do not let preconceived ideas cause you to be biased on any point. Do not try to make the Bible conform to your ideas. Always reconcile your ideas to the Bible. Let the plain language of the references given be read and understood in the same literal way that we would understand similar statements in any other book
— Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man: Contained in Fifty-Two Lessons, One for Each Week of the Year
Belief builds from scratch. Doesn’t have to relax, it doesn’t need space
— Gavin DeGraw
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.
— Charles Dickens
Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.
— Jane Yolen, Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Without literature, life is hell.
— Charles Bukowski
Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.
— Witold Gombrowicz
Every man's memory is his private literature.
— Aldous Huxley
Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived. 
— Margaret Mitchell
People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.
— Chaim Potok, The Chosen
Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other
— Anton Chekhov
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
— Oscar Wilde, Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man
You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
— Donald Barthelme, Come Back, Dr. Caligari
All I wanted was to be loved for myself." (Erik)
— Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed
—  but a thing created is loved before it exists.
Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!
— Anne Frank
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?
— Italo Calvino
Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.
— José Rizal
I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
— Julian Barnes, A Life with Books
Time is a river...and books are boats. Many volumes start down that stream, only to be wrecked and lost beyond recall in its sands. Only a few, a very few, endure the testings of time and live to bless the ages following.
— Joseph Fort Newton, The Lost Symbol
Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
— Edith Wharton
High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.
— Mark Twain
Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.
— Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.
— Gene Wolfe
Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
— W.B. Yeats
Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.
— Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
— D.H. Lawrence
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.
— Romain Gary
have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?
— Walt Whitman
It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
— Mark Twain
Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.
— Barbara Kingsolver
I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.
— Margaret Mitchell
I like my coffee with cream and my literature with optimism.
— Abigail Reynolds, Pemberley by the Sea
O love, O fire! once he drewWith one long kiss my whole soul throughMy lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.
— Alfred Tennyson
If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.
— Anne Frank
As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind
Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.
— Oscar Wilde
It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.
— Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
...and it is also possible, that Saadat Hasan dies, but Manto remains alive.
— Saadat Hasan Manto
I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But, probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clapsed her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann...." It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Whatever is produced in haste goes hastily to waste.
— Saadi
Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.
— William S. Burroughs, Ghost of Chance
Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam" | "She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed
— Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
— John Ruskin
That cloak of love you were wearing—he’s torn it to shreds, undoing the seams of trust that held it together. How can you ever wear those shreds?
— Antonia Michaelis, The Storyteller
The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.
— Christopher Hitchens
To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all. 
— Walt Whitman
In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
— Charles Caleb Colton
What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.
— Brent Weeks
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible.
— Bart D. Ehrman
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
— Oscar Wilde
If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.
— Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
— Henry James
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
— John Irving
Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.
— Jonathan Stroud
The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.
— John Green
We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.
— F. Sionil José, In Search of the Word: Selected Essays
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
— H.L. Mencken
You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.
— Walt Whitman
I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.
— Gabriel García Márquez
Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he’s wrong.
— Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.
— Marcel Proust
It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents of every hue. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none
— Jules Renard
Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World
There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries
— Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?
I shouted the perfect words to scare him off. It was just the delivery (and only the delivery) that made me sound like a twelve-year-old girl with pee running down her leg. I felt dirty and stupid.
— Graham Parke, No Hope for Gomez!
I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.
— Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.
— Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version
Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature
— Anita Brookner, A Start in Life
Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book. 
— Edward Gibbon
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.1010 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author's vitality for potential readers is to present that author ahead of his time as "great" or "classic." Because then the author becomes for the students like medicine or vegetables, something the authorities have declared "good for them" that they "ought to like," at which point the students' nictitating membranes come down, and everyone just goes through the requisite motions of criticism and paper-writing without feeling one real or relevant thing. It's like removing all oxygen from the room before trying to start a fire.
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adele played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line - that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen - that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach.
— Charlotte Brontë
I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.
— Flannery O'Connor
Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.
— Kathy Acker
...there are only two things that really matter in life. Literature and love.
— Daphne Kalotay, Russian Winter
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.
— Jorge Luis Borges
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
You must be more gentle, dear, more sedate,' Ellen told her daughter. 'You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentlemen do not like forward girls.
— Margaret Mitchell
I love and hate this place because it is full of words.
— Markus Zusak
Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night--hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe?
— Kathryn Davis
So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!
— Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.
— Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado
Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.
— E.M. Forster, A Passage to India: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism
[On Female Attraction to Men in Uniform] That male military persona feeds a subconscious, passive-aggressive female desire to dominate the warrior as he is perceived an iconic example of masculinity (particularly amongst traditionally warlike cultures). The damsel in distress theme always struck me as embodying this: the hapless, innocently beautiful woman unwittingly enraptures the heroic male so completely that he would risk all to submit to her at his own peril, and quite in spite of it.
— Tiffany Madison
Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.
— Mark Slouka, Brewster
Literature is a writer's secret life recorded in symbols.
— Will Lavender, Dominance
The end of the world can be cozy at times.
— Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography