Quotes by Essayists - Page 22

His religion at best is an anxious wish - like that of Rebelais a great Perhaps.
Thomas Carlyle
I try to remember what I have too often forgotten to my peril: as far as teaching goes, when all you are is right, what you really are is in trouble.
Garret Keizer
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
Paul Valéry
Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
Roland Barthes
In the future we would have total storage, all of us would, our media libraries would dematerialise and just float above us, books would no longer sit on the shelves reminding us that we had not read them, music and TV and film formats would no longer clutter the den reminding us of all we had not yet listened to or watched.
Joshua Cohen
Our greatest glory consists not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Now, as the weeks passed, there was a future, there was a trouble that would not go away.
Arthur Miller
Happiness ... is achieved only by making others happy.
Stuart Cloete
All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction.
Javier Cercas
Trust men and they will be true to you treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I know what it is: it's a green mamba snake away up in the tree. You don't have to be afraid of them anymore because you are one. They lie so still on the tree branch; they are the same everything as the tree. You could be right next to one and not even know. It's so quiet there. That's just exactly what I want to go and be, when I have to disappear. Your eyes will be little and round but you are so far up there you can look down and see the whole world, Mama and everybody. The tribes of Ham, Shem, and Japheth all together. Finally you are the highest one of all.
Barbara Kingsolver
Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
H.L. Mencken
Like characters in Greek tragedy, we seem fated to push technology towards its ultimate degree as if we were possessed by malignant gods. We call these gods "curiosity" and "creativity" and "reason" and "progress", but when these words are perverted by technocrats, they are more like the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Curtis White
Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall.
Thomas Carlyle
What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Time. So much of our human experience is bound up in time, I muse. It reflects in our everyday colloquialisms, and drives so much of our activities. Yet this obsession with the passing of the hours is a relatively modern phenomenon; an inevitable product of the Industrial Revolution, and its fixation on efficiency. A new master exported by England across the globe, so that in the developed world at least everyone has one wrist on which is clamped the new and unforgiving shackle we call a watch. In less pressurised days, men observed the ageing of the universe through the more sedate changing of the seasons. But no more. Now the hour is king, or the minute and sometimes even the second. We are all people in a rush, where speed is of the essence, and slow is often deployed as a term of abuse.
John Dolan
What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
Edward Abbey
A man is a method a progressive arrangement a selecting principle gathering his like unto him wherever he goes. What you are comes to you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
Virginia Woolf
Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.
Sarah Ruhl
True happiness ... arises in the first place from the enjoyment of one's self and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
Joseph Addison
Without duty life is soft and boneless.
Joseph Joubert
It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.
Walter Pater
Without nothing, everything would be nothing.
Dejan Stojanovic
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
George Santayana
It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true--nobody will ever take you seriously.
Edward Abbey
Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither he nor she; the other has only a name of his own, or her own name. The third-person pronoun is a wicked pronoun: it is the pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls. When I realize that common discourse takes possession of my other and restores that other to me in the bloodless form of a universal substitute, applied to all the things which are not here, it is as if I saw my other dead, reduced, shelved in an urn upon the wall of the great mausoleum of language. For me, the other cannot be a referent: you are never anything but you, I do not want the Other to speak of you.
Roland Barthes
re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.[From the preface to Leaves Grass]
Walt Whitman
To finish the moment to find the journey's end in every step of the road to live the greatest number of good hours is wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A good indignation brings out all one's powers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.
Flannery O'Connor
A man is what he thinks about all day long.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
Joseph Joubert
He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn't, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.
Virginia Woolf
What at one time one refuses to see never vanishes but returns, again and again, in many forms.
Susan Griffin
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
Katherine Anne Porter
When the corpses of [Sir John] Franklin's officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of "The Vicar of Wakefield." These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.
Anne Fadiman
To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love are the two greatest proofs not only of goodness of heart but of strength of mind.
William Hazlitt
What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
Anne Fadiman
When a man dies he does not just die of the disease he has: he dies of his whole life.
Charles Péguy
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Emil M. Cioran
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A matter, as the famous book intoned, of finding the shade of the parachute that best complemented you. But really: With no parachute at all you'd hit the pavement so hard it probably wouldn't even hurt, and you'd unleash a whole new color palate-bone, blood, muscle-in the process.
Elisa Albert
What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.
Anne Carson
Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I'm just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what to tell you, help. Help.
Salman Rushdie
Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now - with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared.
Virginia Woolf
There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.
H.L. Mencken
It partook ... of eternity ... there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.
Virginia Woolf
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I tell some one that I love him – as I may have told a hundred others – my words will convey nothing to him; but the silence which will ensue, if I do indeed love him, will make clear in what depths lie the roots of my love, and will in its turn give birth to a conviction, that shall itself be silent; and in the course of a lifetime, this silence and this conviction will never again be the same. …
Maurice Maeterlinck
There are impertinent inquiries made; your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on the matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was!
Thomas Carlyle
Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature.... It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. How were they related? What were the verbs? Which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I asked a dozen knowledgeable people. No one was inclined to elaborate- or they didn’t know. “Did you see the octopus?” Someone shouted after the dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was THERE, just then? WHY?
Barry López
Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
Adrienne Rich
It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
Thomas Carlyle
I don’t need your praiseto survive. I was here first, before you were here, beforeyou ever planted a garden.And I’ll be here when only the sun and moonare left, and the sea, and the wide field.I will constitute the field.
Louise Glück
There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.
Marilynne Robinson