Quotes by Essayists - Page 14

Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that.
Kenzaburō Ōe
We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
William Hazlitt
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Your head is a lit chamber.
Dejan Stojanovic
To love one’s neighbour in the immovable depths means to love in others that which is eternal; for one’s neighbour, in the truest sense of the term, is that which approaches the nearest to God; in other words, all that is best and purest in man; and it is only by ever lingering near the gates I spoke of, that you can discover the divine in the soul.
Maurice Maeterlinck
A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer he approaches lucid ground warily like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
E B White
All work is the avoidance of harder work.
James Richardson
Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.
Cheryl Strayed
New Rome will be destroyedBy the attacks of new vandals.God always remains silent.
Dejan Stojanovic
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The past will not tell us what we ought to do but... what we ought to avoid.
José Ortega y Gasset
He might have proved a useful adjunct if not an ornament to society.
Charles Lamb
I had a theory; I’m not sure if it was my own but it worked for me. Public spaces, such as streets and subway stations, became inhabitable as I assigned them some value and imprinted an experience on them. If I recited a snatch of Paterson every time I walked along a certain avenue, eventually that avenue would sound like William Carlos Williams. The entrance to the subway at 116th Street was Emily Dickinson’s:Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawnIndicative that suns go down;The notice to the startled grassThat darkness is about to pass.
Valeria Luiselli
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
George Santayana
The thing that drew me to Lafayette as a subject - that he was that rare object of agreement in the ironically named United States - kept me coming back to why that made him unique. Namely, that we the people never agreed on much of anything. Other than a bipartisan consensus on barbecue and Meryl Streep, plus that time in 1942 when everyone from Bing Crosby to Oregonian school children heeded FDR's call to scrounge up rubber for the war effort, disunity is the through line in the national plot - not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington's army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen's pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbor, getting on each other's nerves is our right.
Sarah Vowell
Genius is expansive irresistible and irresistibly expansive. If it is in you no cords can confine it.
Gail Hamilton
It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
Jonathan Franzen
I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance--what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they'll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, it constant themes, are less liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate, less lustrous immortality might be. We all know that a poem can influence other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it. Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?
Mark Strand
The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity. Hence the limited perspective of active and energetic people, the banality of their thought and actions.
Cioran
Christianity is a life, not a doctrine . . . I'm not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own.
Marilynne Robinson
Capitalism has run its course, and we shall have to look for other ideals than the ones that capitalism has encouraged.
Edmund Wilson
She has vivid pictures of Hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages . . .
Salman Rushdie
Memory changes as a person matures.
Siri Hustvedt
Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it — a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!
Virginia Woolf
In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made. The varying degrees of culture are measured by the greater or less precision of the standards. Where there is little such precision, these standards rule existence only grosso modo; where there is much they penetrate in detail into the exercise of all the activities.
Ortega y Gasset
There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and household virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses, --only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.
Walter Savage Landor
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
E B White
There is a point you reach, I mean, when you are just something bad that happened to someone else.
Steve Almond
Without the absolute truth, to know the truth value of our own existence is beyond our strengths/limits/possibilities.
Sorin Cerin
I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,And accrue what I hear into myself...and let sound contribute toward me.
Walt Whitman
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When clouds will become heavier than the land in us led our entire life by the steps of our Destiny, we will understand that not their moments’ rain has darkened the sun of our life, but the failure to be ourselves.
Sorin Cerin
Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener.
Thomas Keneally
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together ... Speech is too often ... the act of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal ... Speech is of Time, silence is of Eternity ... It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another ...
Maurice Maeterlinck
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
Virginia Woolf
There is more reason to say grace before beginning a book than there is to say it before beginning to dine.
Charles Lamb
And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they’re not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense? The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise… You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again…Mario thinks hard again. He’s trying to think of how to articulate something like: But then is battling and vanquishing the self the same as destroying yourself? Is that like saying life is pro-death? … And then but so what’s the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?
David Foster Wallace
I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. ...Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path.
Nick Hornby
It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.
Joseph Joubert
We are a dream of a thought which lives trough the Word.
Sorin Cerin
You think that I am naive, but it is you who are naive. You have no idea what is happening inside of you when you look at a painting. You think that you are getting close to art voluntarily, enticed by its beauty, that this intimacy is taking place in an atmosphere of freedom and that delight is being born in you spontaneously, lured by the divine rod of Beauty. In truth, a hand has grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, led you to this painting and has thrown you to your knees. A will mightier than your own told you to attempt to experience the appropriate emotions. Whose hand and whose will? That hand is not the hand of a single man, the will is collective, born in an interhuman dimension, quite alien to you. So you do not admire at all, you merely try to admire.
Witold Gombrowicz
People who think that love, sex, marriage, work, play, life and death are serious matters are urged NOT to read this book. Buy it, yes, but don't read it. [Regarding "The Fool's Progress"]
Edward Abbey
The present is the living sum-total of the whole past.
Thomas Carlyle
A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.
Arnold Bennett
Henry Miller, Genet, Sade, Bataille are really important writers for me and I love them, but I feel often they don’t love me, you know? I feel I always have to wrap my head around the way the girl is treated in the works, and the way the woman writer has been treated within their philosophies. I think of Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, where Janey Smith is in an S&M relationship with Jean Genet, who she follows around the deserts of Algeria, and he’s horrible to her, and that’s what I think of when I think of my relationship to those writers. I think you have to read the text, obviously, despite that. You seem to be subverting Sade and Bataille’s ideas of the whore, and Henry Miller – all of his cunt portraits, all of his horrors that he writes about – you’re writing about it from an interiority and a subjectivity that we don’t typically get with the ‘whore’ or the ‘slut’ or the sexual girl.
Kate Zambreno
One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.
Roland Barthes
I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another.
Barbara Kingsolver
For the normal man, life is an undisputed reality; only the sick man is delighted by life and praises it so that he won't collapse.
Emil M. Cioran
Write it on your heartthat every day is the best day in the year.He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the daywho allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.Finish every day and be done with it.You have done what you could.Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;begin it well and serenely, with too high a spiritto be cumbered with your old nonsense.This new day is too dear,with its hopes and invitations,to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it. He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.
Jonathan Franzen
Love changes everything. I never suspected it would be so. Requited love, I should say ...
Barbara Kingsolver
Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
John Crowley
The most mortifying infirmity in human nature ... is perhaps cowardice.
Charles Lamb
I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise you that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it and that it's not crazy to fear you'll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.
Cheryl Strayed
You can just be your self’s stranger, never its friend, because you are mortal and it is immortal!
Sorin Cerin
When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburgh, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them?THE WORD FOR THAT IS HEALING.
Cheryl Strayed
Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson