Quotes by Essayists - Page 89

The arrogant elimination of the Djaouts of our world must nerve us to pursue our own combative doctrine, namely: that peaceful cohabitation on this planet demands that while the upholders of any creed are free to adopt their own existential absolutes, the right of others to do the same is thereby rendered implicit and sacrosanct. Thus the creed of inquiry, of knowledge and exchange of ideas, must be upheld as an absolute, as ancient and eternal as any other.
Wole Soyinka
Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.
Walter Benjamin
It is a thing that knows no limit, and before it all men are equal; and the silence of king or slave, in presence of death, or grief, or love, reveals the same features, hides beneath its impenetrable mantle the self-same treasure. For this is the essential silence of our soul, our most inviolable sanctuary, and its secret can never be lost;
Maurice Maeterlinck
Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being.
William Styron
Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that," Himiko said, elaborating her friend's terrific prophecy; " You won't get a divorce Bird. You'll justify yourself like crazy, and try to salvage your married life by confusing the real issues. A decision like divorce is beyond you now, Bird, the poison has gone to work. And you know how the story ends ? Not even your own wife will trust you absolutely, and one day you'll discover for yourself that your entire private life is in the shadow of deception and in the end you'll destroy yourself. Bird, the first signs of self-destruction have appeared already!" " But that's a blind alley! Leave it to you to paint the most hopeless future you can think of. " Bird lunged at jocularity...
Kenzaburō Ōe
...This is the arena in which a spiritualized disobedience means most. It doesn't mean a second New Deal, another massive bureaucratic attack on our problems. It doesn't mean taking to the streets, throwing bricks through the window at the Bank of America, or driving a tractor through the local McDonald's. It means living differently. It means taking responsibility for the character of the human world. That's a real confrontation with the problem of value. In short, refusal of the present is a return to what Thoreau and Ruskin called "human fundamentals, valuable things," and it is a movement into the future. This movement into the future is also a powerful expression of that most human spiritual emotion, Hope.p.124
Curtis White
Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.
William Hazlitt
I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story.
Cheryl Strayed
To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.
Marilynne Robinson
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.
Carlos Fuentes
This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.
Virginia Woolf
To Be is to live with God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or to present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you’d first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn’t any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the reward of strangers’ affection is as dust, lint.
David Foster Wallace
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
H.L. Mencken
We are our memory,we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,that pile of broken mirrors.
Jorge Luis Borges
Silence can be a planrigorously executedthe blueprint to a lifeIt is a presenceit has a history a formDo not confuse itwith any kind of absence
Adrienne Rich
There are too many literati, yet very few are smart; knowledge is acquired far too easily.
Dejan Stojanovic
Tenderness is the repose of passion.
Joseph Joubert
Experience is what really happens to you in the long run the truth that finally overtakes you.
Katherine Anne Porter
Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
Charles Baudelaire
The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.
Jorge Luis Borges
The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
Adam Gopnik
... every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as they merit that exigent name, ideas are never a mere reception of presumed realities, but they are constructions of possibilities; therefore they are pure bits of imagination, or fine ideas of our own...
José Ortega y Gasset
I can never feel that the Illusion of Life is a truth as long as any illusion reflects unreality; however, even an untruth is a truth in its turn.
Sorin Cerin
The American educational psychologist Patricia Alexander has expressed the view that fear paralyses and curiosity empowers. Accordingly, she reasons, we should always be more interested than afraid.
John Dolan
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
Virginia Woolf
In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river
Virginia Woolf
The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.
Emil M. Cioran
The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.
Charles Baudelaire
They said 'ski', but they heard 'vodka'!
Ismail Kadare
Out of sleeping a waking Out of waking a sleep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.
Thomas Carlyle
Discontent is want of self-reliance it is infirmity of will.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight. No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, fleeing at velocities that approach the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the Terror of the Universe.
Edward Abbey
To knock a thing down especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight to the blood.
George Santayana
One unquestioned text we read All doubt beyond all fear above Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it: God is Love.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.
Cheryl Strayed
Rome has been called the "Sacred City": - might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope: it speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart: it waves its mighty shadow over the imagination: it stands in lowly sublimity, on the "hill of ages"; and points with prophetic fingers to the sky: it greets the eager gaze from afar, "with glistering spires and pinnacles adorned," that shine with an internal light as with the lustre of setting suns; and a dream and a glory hover round its head, as the spirits of former times, a throng of intellectual shapes, are seen retreating or advancing to the eye of memory: its streets are paved with the names of learning that can never wear out: its green quadrangles breathe the silence of thought.
William Hazlitt
Yet I believe, as I say, that it was precisely this underhand act that gave birth to her vitriol, for people are at their least forgiving when they themselves have been underhand, as though they would exact their innocence from you at any price.
Rachel Cusk
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view.
Marilynne Robinson
Gringos! They have copied us again
Luis Alberto Urrea
In numele si sub teroarea ei (plictiselii, n.m.) parasesc oamenii caminul si moartea agreabila legata de el si se avanta in lume, spre a muri undeva fara acoperis si fara lacrimi; adolescentii se gandesc la sinucideri in zile infinite de primavara, iar servitoarele fara amanti se lamenteaza duminicile, de parca inima lor e un cimitir in care mortii nu pot dormi.
Emil M. Cioran
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
Virginia Woolf
Infinity is the end. End without infinity is but a new beginning.
Dejan Stojanovic
Do not waste the moment of your life which comes together with death because you will bitterly regret the alienation of your own self.
Sorin Cerin
I am, a shadowthat grows longer as the sunmoves, drawn outon a thread of wonder.If I bear burdensthey begin to be rememberedas gifts, goods, a basketof bread that hurtsmy shoulders but closes mein fragrance. I caneat as I go. ("Stepping Westward")
Denise Levertov
Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.
Roland Barthes
Earth laughs in flowers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.
Thomas Carlyle
When you read and understand a poem comprehending its rich and formal meanings then you master chaos a little.
Stephen Spender
I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything - but I want to work out something in figures - something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I'm a humbug - I mean, I'm not what you all take me for. I'm not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really.And if I could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should give William all he wants.
Virginia Woolf
His words leap across rivers and mountains but his thoughts are still only six inches long.
E B White
In greatness, life and death merge.
Dejan Stojanovic
We are reformers in Spring and Summer in Autumn and Winter we stand by the old reformers in the morning conservers at night.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But love...it's only an illusion. A story one makes up in one's mind about another person. And one knows all the time it isn't true. Of course one knows why one's always taking care not to destroy the illusion.
Virginia Woolf