A FEW QUOTES
About language
« But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.» George Orwell, 1984
"The limits of my language means the limits of my world." Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosopher)
"He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music." James Joyce, A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness-I am nothing." Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"A word after a word after a word is power." Margaret Atwood
"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. " Nathanael Hawthorne
"Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it." Ralph Waldo Emerson
« I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine." Emily Dickinson
About literature
"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." E. Scott Fitzgerald
"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse." E.M Forster
"Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac." Oscar Wilde
"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners." Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
"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
« 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
"Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form." Toni Morrison
"The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose." Margaret Atwood
"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for." Alice Walker
"There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false." Harold Pinter
About the artist/art
« The artist is the creator of beautiful things . Thought and language are to the artist instrument to his art » Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter." Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up." James Baldwin
"You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul." George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah
"Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable." George Bernard Shaw
"Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph." Vincent Van Gogh
"You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality!" William morris Hunt (painter)
"Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans."― Noam Chomsky (about postmodern artists)
Shakespeare
As You like It
"All the world 's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts" - (Act II, Scene VII).
Romeo and Juliet
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet". - (Act II, Scene II).
Measure for Measure
"Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall". - (Act II, Scene I).
King henry the Fifth
"Men of few words are the best men" . - (Act III, Scene II).
King Richard III
"A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!". - (Act V, Scene IV).
"An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told". - (Act IV, Scene IV).