Literature and Words

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.

Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu .

Tel qu’en Lui-Même enfin l’éternité le change .

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

Words are easy, like the wind; Faithful friends are hard to find.

War is what happens when language fails.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

Belief in form but disbelief in content - that's what makes an aphorism charming.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.

We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.

Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then readers give more attention and consider the fruit of their labour more valuable

He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

Every word is a prejudice.

We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.

We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even a good book written against life.