Quotes by Essayists - Page 65

Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences.
Thomas Mann
If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abides, this huge world will come around to him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.
William Hazlitt
These things sensibly affected Theseus, who, thinking it but just not to disregard, but rather partake of, the sufferings of his fellow citizens, offered himself for one without any lot. All else were struck with admiration for the nobleness and with love for the goodness of the act.
Plutarch
Many things which cannot be overcome when they are together yield themselves up when taken little by little.
Plutarch
Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire
It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.
Marilynne Robinson
His face frankly displays his suffering, expressing it with a truly royal simplicity. At such moments even the very best people are apt to give themselves away with the kind of look which says to you more or less directly: 'You see how I'm sticking it out; don't praise me, it's my nature; thanks all the same.' But the Curé de Torcy looks straight at you, guilelessly. His eyes beg your compassion and sympathy. But with what nobility they beg! A king might beg in just that way.
Georges Bernanos
Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.
Jorge Luis Borges
To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.
Walt Whitman
The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.
David Foster Wallace
It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely…and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires.But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful… It will open up your life.
Cheryl Strayed
The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility.
Marilynne Robinson
I never learn anything from listening to myself.
Barbara Kingsolver
...animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.
Barbara Kingsolver
When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I have not yet learned to use our television DVR. One of the points of marriage is that you split labor. In the olden days that meant one hunted and one gathered; now it means one knows where the tea-towels are kept and the other knows how to program the DVR, for why should we both have to know?
Elizabeth Alexander
My belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.
Virginia Woolf
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.
David Foster Wallace
In the essence of truth lies deceit.
Dejan Stojanovic
Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave.
Pico Iyer
When there is no vision people perish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief.
Susan Griffin
Children have more need of models than of critics.
Joseph Joubert
They are both spectacular, Life and death.
Dejan Stojanovic
Good breeding a union of kindness and independence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As far back as I can remember, I’ve utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes.
Emil M. Cioran
Faith as an intellectual state is self-reliance.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.
David Foster Wallace
Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship. So when my friends Joel and Stephen and I play hooky from our jobs in the middle of the afternoon to play Pop-A-Shot in a room full of children, I like to think we are not procrastinators; we are patriots pursuing happiness.
Sarah Vowell
Unwritten words grow out of silence.
Dejan Stojanovic
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is always open, Waiting to be discovered.
Dejan Stojanovic
I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
Flannery O'Connor
Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.
Charles Lamb
You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
Marilynne Robinson
There may be human joy in doing good with definite purpose, but they who do good expecting nothing in return know a joy that is divine.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Speech is silvern silence is golden.
Thomas Carlyle
The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.
Virginia Woolf
Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them.
Leslie Jamison
The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.
Flannery O'Connor
To hide feelings when you are near crying is the secret of dignity.
Dejan Stojanovic
A poem is its own name and cover.
Dejan Stojanovic
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.
George Santayana
There are literary works that speak for themselves and there are writers who boast through work.
Dejan Stojanovic
He will understand when it is too late that it is easier to love.
Dejan Stojanovic
The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.
C.L.R. James
What did you give your kids, besides a lottery of genes? A stance--that mix of bluff and confidence, backbone and wussiness that passes for personality or character. One talks less about ethics after third grade. Don't steal candy or hit other children, if they hadn't learned the costs of violence on their own.
Edward Hoagland
A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits-your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now-we shall find him out and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!
Arthur Miller
No one is interested in real victims, or real criminals. Not local courts, not their fellow citizens, not publishers, and not readers. Everyone simply refuses to believe them. An imaginary crime is much more convincing; reality is too real. They can only identify with an invented crime, only paper evil can excite them.
Dubravka Ugrešić
From nothing comes everything.
Dejan Stojanovic
I utilise all my spare moments. I've read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns.
Max Beerbohm
O.K. I'm running out of appetite. Let this swirl— a bit like Crab Nebula— do for now.
Charles Olson
To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.
Charles Baudelaire
How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.
Charles Baudelaire