Quotes by Essayists - Page 70

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
George Santayana
The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners’ hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel.
Louise Glück
Charity is the perfection and ornament of religion.
Joseph Addison
It is easy to see the glow but hard to recognize the awakening of silence.
Dejan Stojanovic
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmaresif there seemed any danger of their coming true!
Logan Pearsall Smith
I am no fun at all. In fact, I am anti-fun. Not as in anti-violence, but as in anti-matter. I am not so much against fun - although I suppose I kind of am - as I am the opposite of fun. I suck the fun out of a room. Or perhaps I'm just a different kind of fun; the kind that leaves on bereft of hope; the kind of fun that ends in tears.
David Rakoff
If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The self was both its origins and its journey.
Salman Rushdie
And indeed, if we had only the courage to listen to the simplest, the nearest, most pressing voice of our conscience, and be deaf to all else, it were doubtless our solitary duty to relieve the suffering about us to the greatest extent in our power.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Truth is hard-hearted and unrelenting, too clear, precise; a lie is much more imaginative.
Dejan Stojanovic
Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
Roland Barthes
There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.
Thomas Mann
To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.
Witold Gombrowicz
Kindly permit me to tell you, sir, that I hate you. I hate you and your child, as I hate the life of which you are the representative: cheap, ridiculous, but yet triumphant life, the everlasting antipodes and deadly enemy of beauty. I cannot say I despise you - for I am honest. You are stronger than I. I have no armour for the struggle between us, I have only the Word, avenging weapon of the weak. Today I have availed myself of this weapon. This letter is nothing but an act of revenge - you see how honourable I am - and if any word of mine is sharp and bright and beautiful enough to strike home, to make you feel the presence of a power you do not know, to shake even a minute your robust equilibrium, I shall rejoice indeed. -
Thomas Mann
And I'm probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.
Chuck Klosterman
The world has never favored the experimental life. It despises poets, fanatics, prophets and lovers.
Randolph Bourne
. . . there were masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one’s own work.
Virginia Woolf
A possession considered of little value up to now suddenly becomes precious to a person if another person desires it, don't you think?
Christa Wolf
To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
Adrienne Rich
There are anonymous poems and poets without poems.
Dejan Stojanovic
There are times in every life when the past acquires a particular resonance, when we grow sensitive to sounds and voices normally beyond the range of hearing. The past shades into present always and everywhere, but only rarely do we acknowledge the process; only rarely does some trigger force us to recognize ourselves as citizens of that frontier.
Mark Slouka
The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth - with a capital G. 'Progress' in our nation has for too long been confused with 'Growth'; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better - toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do.
Edward Abbey
Possible impossibility emerges From an impossible possibility, Or possibly, impossible possibility Blooms from the impossibly possible impossibility.
Dejan Stojanovic
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
... since the history of words is a mainspring of our intellectual and emotional character.
Cirilo F. Bautista
It is a true proverb, that if you live with a lame man, you will learn to limp.
Plutarch
This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing, no doubt. Still at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these alternations of mood; good days, bad days, for no reason whatever, happiness from a pretty face, downright misery at the sight of a frump.
Virginia Woolf
We believe we have dived down to the most unfathomable depths, and when we reappear on the surface, the drop of water that glistens on our trembling finger-tips no longer resembles the sea from which it came. We believe we have discovered a grotto that is stored with bewildering treasure; we come back to the light of day, and the gems we have brought are false – mere pieces of glass – and yet does the treasure shine on, unceasingly, in the darkness!
Maurice Maeterlinck
I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
Roland Barthes
You don't teach a person how to write as much as you teach that person how to survive the writing process.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
The AmenT of Nature is always a flower.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
a stone / which in its own archaic, simpleminded way / sees life as a chain of failed attempts.
Wisława Szymborska
Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A fair day's wages for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of government.
Thomas Carlyle
What is the American fetish about highways?They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers.Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.But what is after them?They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress.
Ishmael Reed
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone.
David Rakoff
The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.
Edmund White
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don't, that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness.
Edward Abbey
Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.
Adrienne Rich
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
David Foster Wallace
From their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.
Plutarch
Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not.
Dejan Stojanovic
Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me.
Louise Glück
I wished, first of all, to buy my way into people's good graces with my book so that, in subsequent personal contact, I would find the ground already prepared, and, I reasoned, if I succeeded in implanting in their soules a favorable image of me, this image would in turn shape me; and so, willy-nilly, I would become mature.
Witold Gombrowicz
I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.
Walt Whitman
When thought becomes excessively painful action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie
It's like this when you fall hard for a musician. It's a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You're interested in relics -- guitar picks, set lists, the sweaty napkin applied to His brow. You set up shrines in your room. It's not just about the music. It's about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith.
Steve Almond
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.
Rachel Cusk
and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower-roses, carnations, irises, lilac-glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!
Virginia Woolf
But being overborne with numbers, and nobody daring to face about, stretching out his hands to heaven, [Romulus] prayed to Jupiter to stop the army, and not to neglect but maintain the Roman cause, now in extreme danger. The prayer was no sooner made, than shame and respect for their king checked many; the fears of the fugitives changed suddenly into confidence.
Plutarch
The work God carries out in us,' he said after a short pause, 'is not often what we expect. A great deal of the time the Holy Spirit seems to be working backward in us and wasting time. If a lump of iron could form an idea of the file that's slowly rough-shaping it, how furious it would be! Yet that's how God shapes us. Certain saints' lives seem horribly monotonous and desolate.
Georges Bernanos
Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.
Arnold Bennett
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
Walt Whitman
I suppose each of us has his own fantasy of how he wants to die. I would like to go out in a blaze of glory, myself, or maybe simply disappear someday, far out in the heart of the wilderness I love, all by myself, alone with the Universe and whatever God may happen to be looking on. Disappear - and never return. That's my fantasy.
Edward Abbey
We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.
Leslie Jamison
No one can surely know what knowledge is without the presence of truth.
Sorin Cerin
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful we must carry it with us or we will not find it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson