Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I strongly believe that literature can do something that nothing else can do, and that is embody the human spirit.
There are two methods for the literary study of any book - the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view.
Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience.
Literature helps us transcend ourselves.
It is only what is written upon the soul of man that will survive the wreck of time.
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.
Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.