literature

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 motions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority-literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.

History has been kinder to Churchill than many of his contemporaries ever were. Some may be surprised to learn that the following luminary from the field of science-fiction had anything political to say at all: "Winston Churchill, the present would-be British Fuehrer, is a person with a range of ideas limited to the adventures and opportunities of British political life. He has never given evidence of thinking extensively, or of any scientific or literary capacity. . . . His ideology, picked up in the garrison life of India, on the reefs of South Africa, the maternal home and the conversation of wealthy Conservative households, is a pitiful jumble of incoherent nonsense. A boy scout is better equipped. He has served his purpose and it is high time he retired upon his laurels before we forget the debt we owe him. . . ."

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Is it too ingenuous to imagine that anything can be left to say about a garden? Garden literature, descriptive, reminiscent, and technical, has blossomed so profusely among us during the last decade, that he should be an expert indeed who ventures to add thereto.

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

Who can explain Joseph Smith? What are "revelations from God"? What is their test? Is it not beyond reason that a lad, born of poor parents, devoid of any save the commonest education, too poor to buy books, should have accomplished what he did in less than 40 years, unless there was some great reason for it? Let any one, even a literary genius, after 40 years of life, try to write a companion volume to the Book of Mormon, and then almost daily for a number of years give out "revelations" that internally harmonize one with another, at the same time formulate a system of doctrine for a church, introduce many new principles, resuscitate extinct priesthoods and formulate a system of Church government which has no superior upon earth . . . to deny such a man a wonderful power over the human heart and intellect is absurd. Only fanatical prejudice can ignore it. However he may be accounted for by the reasoning mind, Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet was one of the wonders of his time.