Novelist

🇺🇸Ernest Hemingway

Literature

1899–1961

"In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken."

🇺🇸Mark Twain

Literature

1835–1910

"There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practised in the tricks and delusions of oratory."

🇺🇸Carl Sagan

Science

1934–1996

"For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations."

🇬🇧Virginia Woolf

Literature

Bloomsbury Group

1882–1941

"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves."

🇫🇷Oscar Wilde

Literature

Aestheticism

1854–1900

"[On Bernard Shaw] An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Literature

Age of Enlightenment

1749–1832

"Only mankind Can do the impossible: He can distinguish, He chooses and judges, He can give permanence To the moment."

🇫🇷Albert Camus

Literature

continental philosophy

1913–1960

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

Leo Tolstoy

Literature

literary realism

1828–1910

"There is only one time that is important -- NOW! It is the most important time because it is the only time that we have any power."

🇦🇹Franz Kafka

Literature

Realism

1894–1924

"From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you."

🇫🇷Gustave Flaubert

Literature

Realism

1821–1880

"The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him. (18 March 1857)"

Rainer Maria Rilke

Literature

Symbolism

1875–1926

"Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further."

🇫🇷Jean-Paul Sartre

Philosophy

Existentialism

1905–1980

"I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens."

🇬🇧Charles Dickens

Literature

literary realism

1719–1793

"I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be."

🇩🇪Friedrich Schiller

Literature

Sturm und Drang

1895–1990

"What one refuses in a minuteNo eternity will return."

🇫🇷Marcel Proust

Literature

1871–1922

"On ne reçoit pas la sagesse, il faut la découvrir soi-même après un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous épargner."

🇺🇸Edgar Allan Poe

Literature

Romanticism

1872–1961

"Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant."

Miguel de Cervantes

Literature

Mannerism

1547–1616

"A knight errant who turns mad for a reason deserves neither merit nor thanks. The thing is to do it without cause."

🇫🇷Simone de Beauvoir

Philosophy

Existentialism

1908–1986

"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion"

🇺🇸James Joyce

Literature

1870–1931

"His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before."

🇺🇸Walt Whitman

Literature

Transcendentalism

1819–1892

"Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful stroke!"

🇧🇷Victor Hugo

Literature

French Romanticism

1802–1885

"What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul"

🇩🇪Friedrich Hölderlin

Philosophy

Idealism

1770–1843

"Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste."

Søren Kierkegaard

Philosophy

existentialism

1813–1855

"Out of love, God becomes man. He says: "See, here is what it is to be a human being."

🇺🇸Cormac McCarthy

Literature

1933–2023

"People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there."

Rabindranath Tagore

Music

Bengali Renaissance

1861–1941

"God, the Great Giver, can open the whole universe to our gaze in the narrow space of a single land."

🇺🇸F. Scott Fitzgerald

Literature

modernism

1896–1940

"If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them."

🇺🇸Thomas Mann

Literature

"The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed."

🇩🇪Hermann Hesse

Literature

existentialism

1861–1948

"Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil."

🇮🇪Samuel Beckett

Literature

Nouveau Roman

1906–1989

"Does one ever know oneself why one laughs?"

🇺🇸Sylvia Plath

Literature

1932–1963

"How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into."

🇺🇸Philip Roth

Literature

1933–2018

"The New York Times Featured Author: Philip Roth"

🇺🇸Thomas Pynchon

Literature

1760–1796

"Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts."

🇬🇧Aldous Huxley

Literature

1894–1963

"Maybe this world is another planet’s hell."

🇺🇸David Foster Wallace

Literature

Postmodernism

1962–2008

"Betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle's always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave"

🇺🇸Ralph Ellison

Literature

1914–1994

"Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in."

🇺🇸Saul Bellow

Literature

1915–2005

"For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it."

🇺🇸Don DeLillo

Literature

b. 1936

"I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Literature

1918–2008

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice."

🇺🇸Maya Angelou

Literature

1928–2014

"I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me "I love you." … There is an African saying which is: "Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt."

🇳🇬Chinua Achebe

Literature

1930–2013

"The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place."