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The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.

— William Empson

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More quotes by William Empson

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

Legal Fiction (1928)

Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul.

This Last Pain (1930)

There is a supreme God in the ethnological section; . . .
His smooth wood creeps with all the creeds of the world.

Homage to the British Museum (1935)

Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

Bacchus (1935)

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Empson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.