Quotes by Essayists - Page 3

Quixote shines from Lorca and Picasso, From Dalí and El Greco, From the gloomy 'View of Toledo.' He was born before Cervantes.

Dejan Stojanovic

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He also said - pointedly - that space travel nowadays was an escape from the problems of Earth. That is, one took off for the stars in the hope that the worst would happen and be done with in one's absence. And indeed I couldn't deny that more than once I had peered anxiously out the porthole - especially when returning from a long voyage - to see whether or not our planet resembled a burnt potato.

Stanisław Lem

…how it would be nice if, for every sea waiting for us, there would be a river, for us. And someone -a father, a lover, someone- able to take us by the hand and find that river -imagine it, invent it- and put us on its stream, with the lightness of one only word, goodbye. This, really, would be wonderful. It would be sweet, life, every life. And things wouldn’t hurt, but they would get near taken by stream, one could first shave and then touch them and only finally be touched. Be wounded, also. Die because of them. Doesn’t matter. But everything would be, finally, human. It would be enough someone’s fancy -a father, a lover, someone- could invent a way, here in the middle of the silence, in this land which don’t wanna talk. Clement way, and beautiful.A way from here to the sea.

Alessandro Baricco

Pain indolence sterility endless ennui have also their lesson for you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.

Barbara Kingsolver

And the supreme mystery was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

Virginia Woolf

Eventually, I headed to the bathroom, and I mention this only because I saw in that bathroom the most quintessentially American artifact I have ever encountered: a bright blue rubber mat resting in the bottom of the urinal emblazoned with the following legend:EpplyWorld's Cleanest AirportOmaha, NEGod bless our relentless idiotic optimism.

Steve Almond

Few minds are spacious; few even have an empty place in them or can offer some vacant point. Almost all have narrow capacities and are filled by some knowledge that blocks them up. What a torture to talk to filled heads, that allow nothing from the outside to enter them! A good mind, in order to enjoy itself and allow itself to enjoy others, always keeps itself larger than its own thoughts. And in order to do this, these thoughts must be given a pliant form, must be easily folded and unfolded, so that they are capable, finally, of maintaining a natural flexibility.All those short-sighted minds see clearly within their little ideas and see nothing in those of others; they are like those bad eyes that see from close range what is obscure and cannot perceive what is clear from afar. Night minds, minds of darkness.

Joseph Joubert

The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.

Leigh Hunt

Most every charge you level at American capitalism applies with equal force to communism, with this nice difference, that the Reds make no pretense at such frivolities as civil liberties or environmentalism. The differences in degree are so great that they result in a radical difference in kind.

Edward Abbey

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live-moreover, the only one.

Emil M. Cioran

We had as lief not be as not be ourselves.

William Hazlitt

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

Joseph Joubert

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

Flannery O'Connor

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.

Roland Barthes

And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day.

Barbara Kingsolver

If these laws [in the Bible] belonged to any other ancient culture we would approach them very differently. We need not bother to reject the code of Hammurabi. Presumably it is because Moses is still felt to make some claim on us that this project of discrediting his law is persisted in with such energy. The unscholarly character of the project may derive from the supposed familiarity of the subject.

Marilynne Robinson

Macaulay is well for awhile but one wouldn't live under Niagara.

Thomas Carlyle

But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?

David Foster Wallace

People are ridiculous only when they try or seem to be that which they are not.

Giacomo Leopardi

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.

Emil M. Cioran

The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.

Thomas Mann

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.

Siri Hustvedt

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.

Charles Simic

Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.

Thomas Carlyle

When following God, Zero we never find.

Dejan Stojanovic

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Thomas Mann

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

How beautifully the leaves grow old. How full of light and colour are their last days.

John Burroughs

Depression means self-loathing, self-disgust, and the kind of emotional numbness that feels like psychic death.

William Deresiewicz

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

Virginia Woolf

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

Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

H.L. Mencken

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

Emil M. Cioran

An institution is the lengthening shadow of one man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

David Shields

Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.

Anne Carson

I swear to you the architects shall appear without fall, I swear to you they will understand you and justify you, The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you, and encloses all and is faithful to all, He and the rest shall not forget you, they shall perceive that you are not an iota less than they, You shall be fully glorified in them.

Walt Whitman

Here is the test of wisdom, Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Walt Whitman

Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same kind as you sow, and not to hope to buy one kind with an other kind. Friendship buys friendship; justice, justice; military merit, military success...Yet there is commonly a confusion of expectations on these points. Hotspur lives for the moment, praises himself for it, and despises Furlong, that he does not. Hotspur of course is poor, and Furlong is a good provider. The odd circumstance is that Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this improvidence, which ought to be rewarded with Furlong's lands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hitler is the human catch-all for all other terrible humans.

Chuck Klosterman

Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul.

Walt Whitman

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

George Santayana

This may be the curse of the human race, not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.

Salman Rushdie

For me at least there came moments when faith wavered. But there is the great lesson and the great triumph: keep the fire burning until by and by out of the mass of sordid details there comes some result.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

David Foster Wallace

It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead

Nick Hornby

We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

Virginia Woolf

वसुधा का नेता कौन हुआ?भूखंड-विजेता कौन हुआ?अतुलित यश-क्रेता कौन हुआ?नव-धर्म-प्रणेता कौन हुआ?जिसने न कभी आराम किया,विघ्नों में रहकर नाम किया

Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar'

In September countless sand and house-martins jazz above the river, taking insects from the surface, from the air, thousands of birds kissing the river farewell. They creak, a sound like the air rubbing against itself. Summer is everything they know; they're preparing themselves, sensing in the shortening days a door they must dash through before it shuts.

Kathleen Jamie

I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

Marilynne Robinson

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 don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.

Stanisław Lem

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much? Have you practis'd so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Walt Whitman

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

Carlos Fuentes

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

Adrienne Rich

Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?

Barbara Kingsolver

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