Quotes by Essayists - Page 19

There is a pledge of the big and of the small in the infinite.

Dejan Stojanovic

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. . . . The force of character is cumulative.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Language is fossil poetry

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Spiritual force is stronger than material force thoughts rule the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation.

William Deresiewicz

Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on.

David Foster Wallace

Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger selves. It's human nature to inject every old picture with positive abstractions. We can't help ourselves. We all do it. We want those things to be true, because we all hope future generations will have the same thoughts when they come across forgotten photographs of us.

Chuck Klosterman

Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before and by thousands.

H.L. Mencken

Tell me something only you know and make a new friend.

Dejan Stojanovic

There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.

Barbara Kingsolver

We take care of our health we lay up money we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all-friends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our greatest glory consists not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

Virginia Woolf

All people are enslaved by something.

Dejan Stojanovic

I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.

Salman Rushdie

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.

David Foster Wallace

What a ruler has to rely upon is only the human heart. Human hearts are to the ruler what roots are to a tree, what oil is to a lamp, water to fish, fields to a farmer, or money to a merchant.

Su Shi

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

...Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the peopleare right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths,the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.

E B White

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.... It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Disgust with injustice may sharpen the desire for justice. Readers who don’t see this connection merely wish to be entertained, and I have neither skill nor desire to turn the agony of a people into entertainment.

Ayi Kwei Armah

Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.

Dejan Stojanovic

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

Roland Barthes

I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.

Stanisław Lem

What is reading but silent conversation.

Walter Savage Landor

Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.

Frank Moore Colby

When a man is pushed tormented defeated he has a chance to learn something he has been put on his wits on his manhood he has gained the facts learned his ignorance is cured of the insanity of conceit has got moderation and real skill.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who are fond of setting things to rights have no great objection to setting them wrong.

William Hazlitt

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

Stanisław Lem

You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade.

Jonathan Franzen

There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.

John Crowley

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

There is no word equivalent to 'cuckold' for women.

Joseph Epstein

Suddenly, I was stopped by a quiet song . .Somebody stood, swaying slowly on the road,In the darkest shadow by a puddle,And low above it a small tree grew . .It might’ve been a wild cherry tree . .He kept singing, watching the puddle fill . .I dragged the pine through the water,And with my other hand steadied my sack,Where a bottle of red vino dangled . .He didn’t move, but kept on singing . .Should I have stopped thereAnd joined his singing? . .Had he foundThe one happy tree? . .No one knows where it grows—Or what it looks like . .And who is allowed to recognize it? . .I never stood under it,Even to wait for rain to passOr watch between the dropsThe silent froth appear . .Swaying, he kept on singing . .Otherwise, he would have fallenAnd the rain stopped . .He danced his own rainUnder that tree . .I can’t do such things . .Perhaps it was a wolf? . .

Oleh Lysheha

The night seemed long. Wilbur's stomach was empty and his mind was full. And when your stomach is empty and your mind is full, it's always hard to sleep.

E B White

All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.

Lewis Thomas

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.

José Ortega y Gasset

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

Anne Carson

Total knowledge is annihilation Of the desire to see, to touch, to feel The world sensed only through senses And immune to the knowledge without feeling.

Dejan Stojanovic

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,but what I reject is more numerous,denser, more demanding than before.A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable loss.

Wisława Szymborska

Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a squeak out of it.

Nick Hornby

The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.

George Steiner

A fierce hatred of embarrassment ruled a surprising amount of the life of Moses Malone, the Hall of Fame basketball center.

Joseph Bottum

For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit?

Virginia Woolf

With the past I have nothing to do nor with the future. I live now.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are the bourgeoisie—the third estate, as they call us now—and what we want is a nobility of merit, nothing more. We don't recognize this lazy nobility we now have, we reject our present class hierarchy. We want all men to be free and equal, for no one to be someone else's subject, but for all to be subject to the law. There should be an end of privileges and arbitrary power. Everyone should be treated equally as a child of the state, and just as there are no longer any middlemen between the layman and his God, so each citizen should stand in direct relation to the state. We want freedom of the press, of employment, of commerce. We want all men to compete without any special privileges, and the only crown should be the crown of merit.

Thomas Mann

The wildest colts make the best horses.

Plutarch

To accomplish the perfect perfection, a little imperfection helps.

Dejan Stojanovic

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!

Charles Baudelaire

To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was going to be a memory when I grew up.

Alejandro Zambra

When preparing for Book One, I talked to a couple of psychiatrists about psychosomatic phenomena, neuroses and dissociative conditions, for example the so—called hysterical blindness suffered by many who saw the Killing Fields in Pol Pot’s Cambodia: their eyes objectively see, but they are not aware of it and are blind because they believe they can’t see. One specialist told me that among modern Western people, ’metaphorical’ symptoms such as Fredy or those Cambodians evince are much rarer now than earlier in the twentieth century or before. Nowadays most people are better equipped by education to verbalise their neuroses, and have lots of jargon in which to do so. For most of the dissociative dimension, I could draw on things I knew from within myself.

Les Murray

Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.

John Burroughs

The life of truth is cold.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.

Barbara Kingsolver

Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.

Dejan Stojanovic

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.

Marilynne Robinson

It is essential to the triumph of reform that it shall never succeed.

William Hazlitt

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

Flannery O'Connor

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