Quotes by Essayists - Page 30

This invisible and divine goodness, of which I only speak here because of its being one of the surest and nearest signs of the unceasing activity of our soul, this invisible and divine goodness ennobles, in decisive fashion, all that it has unconsciously touched.
Maurice Maeterlinck
I study nature so as not to do foolish things.
Mary Ruefle
If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!
Charles Baudelaire
The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons strategems and spoils but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.
Thomas Carlyle
Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them send their children wandering drown them in floods and fires and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings.
Marilynne Robinson
There is nothing so expensive, really, as a big, well-developed, full-bodied preconception.
E B White
After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.
E B White
Oliver, success is usually a feeling of mere relief, where failure is pain. Happiness, you see, lies in neither, but in sticking to a daily ritual and becoming absorbed in something useful. When the war is over, even the greatest warriors do not exult. They go back to their garden or kitchen or library -- or school -- and resume life.(as said by Mrs. Pearson)
Adam Gopnik
When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.
Salman Rushdie
He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite.
Jorge Luis Borges
High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of new continents, though we might ourselves have behaved atrociously to indigenes, were baffled by the determination with which Europe returned to the frenzies of racial myth. Nice boys and not-so-nice boys took up the theme, put on the uniform, did the dirty work.
Thomas Keneally
Love is not altogether a delirium yet it has many points in common therewith.
Thomas Carlyle
There is much in our culture to affront the eye of the fervent terrorist postulant, things out there that do us no favors, to be sure. If, for example, it came to light that the dangerously thin, affectless, value-deficient, higher aspiration-free, amateur-porn chanteuse Paris Hilton was actually a covert agent from some secret Taliban madrassa whose mission was to portray the ultimate capitalist-whore puppet of a doomed society with nothing more on its mind than servitude to Mammon and celebrity at any cost, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
David Rakoff
Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it no excess of explanation and it is full of suggestions the raw material of possible poems and histories.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
She tried to think of what to say to make it all better again, or at least the way it was before she'd made her confession, though she didn't regret having confessed. Perhaps that was what had been wrong with her all along. Now that the lie wasn't between them anymore, maybe she could love him again.
Cheryl Strayed
No tiredness can destroy hope like death can, as the absolute fatigue of life.
Sorin Cerin
Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Roland Barthes
Everything and nothing are the same in the Absolute.
Dejan Stojanovic
And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurt us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent.
Arnold Bennett
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
Walt Whitman
Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.
Thomas Mann
As soon as there is life there is danger.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone one the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil-in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn't think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one's heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one's naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions.
Joseph Epstein
A concrete example of this mechanism is found in one of the most alarming phenomena of the last thirty years: the enormous increase in the police force of all countries. The increase of population has inevitably rendered it necessary. However accustomed we may be to it, the terrible paradox should not escape our minds that the population of a great modern city, in order to move about peaceably and attend to its business, necessarily requires a police force to regulate the circulation. But it is foolishness for the party of "law and order" to imagine that these "forces of public authority" created to preserve order are always going to be content to preserve the order that that party desires. Inevitably they will end by themselves defining and deciding on the order they are going to impose- which, naturally, will be that which suits them best.
Ortega y Gasset
Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
... I slipped our wicker bed and walked the sands where we were also roughly repeated: some young couple, "you did," "I didn't," "you sure the fuck did" – they huggedthat bicker to their chests like blankets fighting cold.
Albert Goldbarth
A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.
Charles Baudelaire
The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.
Jonathan Franzen
I Think it is lost.....but nothing is ever lost nor can be lost .The body sluggish, aged, cold, the ember left from earlier fires shall duly flame again.
Walt Whitman
I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.
David Foster Wallace
All those adorable towheaded kids in the promotional film are going to turn thirteen. Once a family member hits puberty, odds are that everybody is not going to have the same ideals. Unless everybody gets together and agrees that the new ideals involve turning the front yard into a skate ramp and officially changing Dad's name to Fuckhead.
Sarah Vowell
Thinking of things" is but a special way of dealing with them; but, as is obvious, it is a secondary manner of doing so and thus presupposes another [i.e., the primordial one]. The fundamental error—the "intellectualist" error—committed in Greece and modern Europe is tantamount to presupposing the opposite and to regarding one's intellectual manner of relating to things as one's primordial way of living. Descartes thus dared to define a human being, that is, the one living or "self," as une chose qui pense d'autres choses ["a thing that thinks of other things"]. That's done it! As if living were just being engaged in thinking of things! What about stumbling on them?
José Ortega y Gasset
Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?
Barbara Kingsolver
On the Bigotry of Culture:: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing.
José Ortega y Gasset
A book is not completed till it's read.
Salman Rushdie
When you read a novel, it seems that everything is clear, trite and understandable. But when you yourself fall in love, you understand that nobody knows anything and everyone must decide for themselves.
Sarah Ruhl
Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can’t be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall.t  11  I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.
Virginia Woolf
if psychoanalysis was late-19th-century secular Judaism's way of constructing spiritual meaning in a post-religious world and retail is the late 20th century's way of constructing meaning in a postreligious world, what does it mean that I'm impersonating the father of psychoanalysis in a store window to commemorate a religious holiday?
David Rakoff
I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.
Czesław Miłosz
What if the preacher or father’s saying ‘Someone here’s lost and hopeless’ was tantamount to those Sun-Times horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give their horoscope readers that special eerie feeling of particularity and insight, exploiting the psychological fact that most people are narcissistic and prone to the illusion that they and their problems are uniquely special and that if they’re feeling a certain way then surely they’re the only person who is feeling like that.
David Foster Wallace
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
E B White
She--the unnamed lady--simply drew his hands to the Paleolithic places men always have grown tumid from feeling, like the outward cradle of the hips within which a fetus will reside and her breasts that will nourish it, once born.
Edward Hoagland
There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again,There is a street close by forbidden to my feet,There's a mirror that's seen me for the very last time,There is a door that I have locked till the end of the world.Among the books in my library (I have them before me)There are some that I shall never open now.This summer I complete my fiftieth year;Death is gnawing at me ceaselessly.
Jorge Luis Borges
Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother.
Barbara Kingsolver
Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.
Joseph Joubert
You might consider how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.
David Foster Wallace
The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how the impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Anne Carson
Glittering generalities! They are blazing ubiquities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.
Roland Barthes
The biggest dog has been a pup.
Joaquin Miller
I pay the School Master but 'tis the school boys that educate my son.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
[Men] act in response to an outward situation, and on being presented with an opportunity to conform to a pattern. If the pattern gives licence to cruelty, so much the better. They take advantage of the licence so thoughtlessly, so thoroughly, that it becomes perfectly clear: the generality of mankind are only waiting for the chance, only waiting for outward circumstance to sanction brutality and allow them to be cruel and brutal to their heart's content.
Thomas Mann
The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man
José Ortega y Gasset
When the star dies, Its eye closes; tired of watching, It flies back to its first bright dream.
Dejan Stojanovic
We are beings only in the extent of Our Life's Illusion.
Sorin Cerin
Whatever others may say, they say it to deceive and comfort themselves, not help you.
Dejan Stojanovic
...I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them...
Barbara Kingsolver
I swear to you the architects shall appear without fall, I swear to you they will understand you and justify you, The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you, and encloses all and is faithful to all, He and the rest shall not forget you, they shall perceive that you are not an iota less than they, You shall be fully glorified in them.
Walt Whitman
The world is not made of bread and honey…nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.
John Cowper Powys
The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so).
Roland Barthes