Literature is as rich a teacher as science, but merely differs in technique. Literature takes us into peoples' minds, science takes their minds and categorizes them. This is why literature will always be perceived as being more human, because it relates to emotions rather than to logic, and humans are creatures of emotion. Science cannot describe these emotions.
The aim of science is to find out and explain the properties and structure of objects. But literature, on the other hand, focuses on stimulating and understanding of everyday life. It is a means of gaining culture and enriching our knowledge in different areas of activity. It can help us to have a great imagination and it makes things easier when it comes to making compositions on different themes. It gives us the possibility to speak about science, even if we don't work in this domain, or we can express our opinion about a political aspect, just because we have read something connected to that. It offers us the possibility to enter the world of imagination, and to leave apart the real one for a couple of hours. We come to meet kings and queen, epochs many years ago, dream in the world of the rich or imagine how life will be in the future. It gives us the possibility to be another character in the story we read, to judge it from our perspective, to imagine the ending of it. Sometimes, we identify ourselves with the characters in the stories we read and they can give us some clues to solve our problems and how to react in certain circumstances. Books are inspired from reality because even if authors are considered to be somehow different from common people, they are in fact preoccupied by the same problems as we all are and suffer like us, too. Literature is said to be the mirror of the society. If we know how society operated in the past, it is due to the literature of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantics, and even today, literature portrays social phenomena, politics or new ideologies.
To conclude with, I would like to say that literature is the perfect means to enrich our culture, to express correctly and have a rich vocabulary, to be able to interfere in conversations in different fields of interest and to really be considered an erudite person.