Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Read the writers whose work is still around and has survived the winds of fashion and the attacks of the ignorant and the bigoted - read everything you can get your hands on.

If any of my plays outlive me or get on library book shelves and somehow stay read, all of a sudden it's a testament to "that's part of our culture, that's part of our history."

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.

In many ways we are all sons and daughters of ancient Greece.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had.

I wish I could write a book that will be read for as long as our civilization lasts. I would value it much more highly than any business success if I could contribute to an understanding of the world in which we live or, better yet, if I could help to preserve the economic and political system that has allowed me to flourish as a participant.

No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead.

There are, indeed, few kinds of composition from which an author, however learned or ingenious, can hope a long continuance of fame.

Sappho survives, because we sing her songs; And Eschylus, because we read his plays!

There is nothing more important than writing well for the young, if literature is to have a continuance ... They will inherit the earth; and nothing that we value will endure in the world unless they can be persuaded to value it too.

We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities have been decayed and demolished?

Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature. They are like gigantic trees that we sometimes see on the banks of a stream; which, by their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a neighboring plant, and perhaps worthless weed, to perpetuity.

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.

When I stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated, and not trulycumulative treasure; where immortal works stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive their month, and cobweb and mildew have already spread from these to the binding of those; and happily I am reminded of what poetry is,--I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. Alas! that so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole!

I think Austin is read more now than Charles Dickens, and Dickens was much more popular in his day. She endures because of her classicism.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

High art alone is eternal and the bust outlives the city.

Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure some kind of permanence, if only in the history of the 1960s and of science fiction.

When eras die, their legacies Are left to strange police. Professors in New England guard The glory that was Greece.

By the golden chain Homer meant nothing else than the sun.

You can assume that if a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males.