Quotes by Essayists - Page 18

All life is the struggle the effort to be itself.

José Ortega y Gasset

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Was there someone absent from the table of creation?

Sorin Cerin

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.

Georges Bernanos

It was true that I had traveled great distances for one so young, but my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and all but a stranger to death…I had absented myself in my smug and airless self-deprivation.

William Styron

I read like the flame reads the wood.

Alfred Döblin

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Walter Benjamin

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity.The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.

Pico Iyer

Imagination has always had powers of resurrection that no science can match.

Ingrid Bengis

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

Thomas Carlyle

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

William H. Gass

But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.

Adrienne Rich

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

George Steiner

the marketplace is capable only of calculating exclusive costs; that is; excluding all possible costs that interfere with profit. Leadership of society requires the calculation of inclusive costs. To invoke the marketplace, as if calling upon the Holy Spirit, is to limit ourselves to the narrow and short-term interests of exclusion.(IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)

John Ralston Saul

It's not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous but rather the studious way we try to hide them and our desire to act as if they did not exist.

Giacomo Leopardi

And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges

She wanted to say, I am made of smoke. My mind is smoke, my thoughts are smoke, I am all smoke and only smoke. This body is a garment I put on, which by my magic art I have made capable of functioning as a human body functions, it's so biologically perfect that it can conceive children and pop them out in threes, fours and fives. Yet I am not of this body and could, if I chose, inhabit another woman, or an antelope, or a gnat. Aristotle was wrong, for I have lived for aeons, and altered by body when I chose, like a garment of which I had grown tired. The mind and the body are two, she wanted to say, but she knew it would disappoint him to be disagreed with, so she held her tongue.

Salman Rushdie

rouble creates a capacity to handle it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Ralph Waldo Emerson“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.

Jonathan Franzen

To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.

Virginia Woolf

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am dead because I lack desire,I lack desire because I think I possess.I think I possess because I do not try to give.In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing:Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;In desiring to become, you begin to live.

René Daumal

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.

Salman Rushdie

What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.

Emil M. Cioran

Life is only a flicker of melted ice.

Dejan Stojanovic

Every fundamentalism focuses on end times, and Armageddon is, in a sense, a rhetorical trope, an emphatic and overwhelming conclusion, meant to wrap up and make tidy the mistaken wanderings of history. For a fundamentalist the end is one of the forms desire takes, a passion no different from lust or avarice, intense with longing and the need for fulfillment and relief. It’s like they’re horny for apocalypse. They get off on denouements, which partly explains why Hell House never amounted to much more than a series of murderous conclusions. It focused only on that part of a story where life finds itself fated. Inside every act a judgement was coiled. Real people with their ragged and uncertain lives, their stumbling desires, their bleak or blessed futures, would only break into the narrative, complicating the story, dragging it on endlessly.

Charles D'Ambrosio

We are a being only through our Illusion of Life.

Sorin Cerin

When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love.

Salman Rushdie

It is one of the beautiful compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Charles Dudley Warner

As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.

Thomas Mann

When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.

Virginia Woolf

My job is to assist you in finding the answer that is right for you. Not the answer that would be right for me.

John Dolan

In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.

Sarah Vowell

My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be.

Flannery O'Connor

Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have learned that to be with those I like is enough

Walt Whitman

He that rides his hobby gently must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.

Arnold Bennett

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains losses and disappointments but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.

Joseph Addison

Never hide your fear because it will become your own God, hidden inside you.

Sorin Cerin

In a room with many windowssome thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.

Jane Hirshfield

Many writers were better before they became famous.

Dejan Stojanovic

Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.

Thomas Carlyle

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

These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

Marilynne Robinson

So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.' Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even mo

Barbara Kingsolver

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since nothing is absolute There is no absolute silence, Only an appearance Of temporary peace.

Dejan Stojanovic

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,that soft summer morninground a turning in the path,the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,its legs in the air like a woman in needburning its wedding poisonslike a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.I am the vampire of my own heart,one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughterwho can no longer smile.Am I dead?I must be dead.

Charles Baudelaire

Most of them don't know what communism is, could not pick it out of a lineup. They only know what anticommunism is. The two are practically unrelated.

Barbara Kingsolver

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.

David Foster Wallace

Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.

Charles Lamb

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.

Nick Hornby

All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.

Joseph Joubert

It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The gun that didn't have a bullet in its chamber. And the mother. Always the mother. The one who would never come to me.

Cheryl Strayed

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

Charles Simic

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are “pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.” Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.

Anne Fadiman

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