#literature

Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#beauty

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is arts aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. ↗

— Wilde

#literature #preface #art

Words are a puzzle; put them together the right way and you get something beautiful. ↗

— Amy Joy

#wordsmithing #writing #beauty

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#literature #reading #beauty

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others? ↗

— James Salter

#literature #reading #words #change

It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#literature #philosophy-of-life #change

Flannery O'Connor, in a note to the editor of "Wise Blood" that pertained to changes he wanted to make, wrote "Perhaps I am prematurely arrogant . . . ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#southern-writers #change

My soul is in the sky. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#literature #wisdom #dreams

Don't yield! Keep up your courage! The same sun looks down on all of us! ↗

— Eiji Yoshikawa

#taira-no-kiyomori #the-heike-story #courage

Every man needs his Siren To check his courage and strength When he hears her song In his travels through the unknown. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #literature #literature-quotes #poetry #poetry-quotes