I said that the ages of history were analogous to the ages of man, and that each age of literature was the truest picture of the history of its day; and for this very reason English literature is the best perhaps, the only teacher of English history, to women especially.

Literature is a kind of intellectual light, which, like the light of the sun, may sometimes enable us to see what we do not like; but who would wish to escape unpleasing objects, by condemning himself to perpetual darkness?

With the advent of Mme de Villedieu in France and her more celebrated contemporary, Mrs. Behn, in England, literature became a profession whereby women could command a livelihood.

With me literature is a question of sense, intellectual sense if you will, but sense all the same, and ruled by the same capricesthose of the flesh?

He had many times thought he would relinquish the drudgery of teaching, and support himself by his pen; but he remembered the maxim of Scott,that literature was a good staff, but a poor crutch,and he stuck to his school.

In like manner, in the development of the social organism, as the life of nations becomes more complex, Thought assumes a more imperial character; and Literature, in its widest sense, becomes a delicate index of social evolution.

Literature was his solace and amusement, not a source of profit, or probably of contemporary fame.

English literature is also a combination of French and Saxon elements.

If literature is not the essential requisite of the modern academick, I am yet persuaded, that Cambridge and Oxford, however degenerated, surpass the fashionable academies of our metropolis, and the gymnasia of foreign countries.

It may be objected that literature and art are ornamental affairs, which count for little in the deadly strife of nations.

The literature of every nation is its autobiography.

" "You think, then, that literature and a cultivated mind are the only assurance for the constancy of our principles!" "Humph!why do you suppose, sir, that learning and ingenuity do not often serve people rather to hide their crimes than to restrain them from committing them?

German literature since 1700 is not simply the continuation of former literature with the addition of radical innovations, as is the case with the literature of the same period in England, but was systematically constructed on new theoriesif it may be said that nature and history systematically "construct."

Of course you will study now to astonish me, or to surprise your young friends, or for some other equally wise reason; but the time may come when literature will be its own exceeding great reward.

Literature was his solace and amusement, not a source of profit, or probably of contemporary fame.

So the newspaper was born, and literature in its widest sense, including the book, the newspaper, and the magazine, became the chief instrument of a nation's progress.

Literature and Dogma (1873) is, in general, a plea for liberality in religion.

Literature is the expression of life in words of truth and beauty; it is the written record of man's spirit, of his thoughts, emotions, aspirations; it is the history, and the only history, of the human soul.

DRISCOLL Literature, they say, is always a great strain on a man's vitality.

Now literature (to repeat what has been than more once stated earlier in this book) is a way of escape from life as well as an echo or mirror of it, and the novel as the form of literature which more than any other men read for pleasure, is the main avenue for this escape.

Second, literature has become the mirror of truth; and the first requirement of every serious novel or essay is to be true to the life or the facts which it represents.

And hence literature is no longer merely a thing of vocabulary, of phrase, of rhythm, of assonance, of alliteration, or of metrical and philosophical form.

Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.

Literature is a fragment of fragments: the least of what happened and was spoken, has been written; and of the things that have been written, very few have been preserved.

Literature is a revelation of the life of the soul.