Quotes by Essayists - Page 5

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

Virginia Woolf

Silence is one great art of conversation.

William Hazlitt

Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

George Santayana

as some strings, untouched,sound when no one is speaking.So it was when love slipped inside us.

Jane Hirshfield

Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books.

Joseph Joubert

The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.

Jorge Luis Borges

She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

Nick Hornby

O to be self-balanced for contingencies, to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.

Walt Whitman

Or one meaning of here is “in this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of,” or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebody—Here you are. Here, he said to her. Here both recognizes and demands recognition. I see you, or here, he said to her. In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of.

Claudia Rankine

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To learn to love, one must first learn to see.

Maurice Maeterlinck

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

Salman Rushdie

There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.

H.L. Mencken

In the lie of truth lies the truth.

Dejan Stojanovic

There always comes the day when children swallowthe key to the door of secrecy. They’ll not return it.

Milan Rúfus

[What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum]: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping like sand, through our fingers.

Salman Rushdie

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.

H.L. Mencken

Do I raise the dead when I put him behind bars? Then what'll I do it for? We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him!

Arthur Miller

(Dune's Frank) Herbert made religion the inescapable instrument of cultural change.

Joseph Bottum

My goal in life is to be content. By that I don't mean "fine" or "basically satisfied." I don't mean settling. I mean, for last of better terms, feeling like I'm in the right life.

Meghan Daum

I travel, always arriving in the same place.

Dejan Stojanovic

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

Jorge Luis Borges

To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one’s own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

Barry López

Poverty Frost Famine Rain Disease are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A strong passion for any object will ensure success for the desire of the end will point out the means.

William Hazlitt

There are those to whom one must advise madness.

Joseph Joubert

Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good.

Barbara Kingsolver

I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding.

Sarah Ruhl

Land of hope and glory Mother of the Free How shall we extol thee who are borne of thee? Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set God who made thee mighty make thee mightier yet.

A.C. Benson

I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties.

Mark Slouka

Death swallows death.

Dejan Stojanovic

And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream.Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger.Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for.The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird.

Jorge Luis Borges

This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.

Sarah Ruhl

If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.

Salman Rushdie

Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet’s mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason.

Czesław Miłosz

Consciousness is a born hermit.

George Santayana

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.

Charles Lamb

Lincoln's story confounds those who see depression as a collection of symptoms to be eliminated. But it resonates with those who see suffering as a potential catalyst of emotional growth. "What man actually needs," the psychiatrist Victor Frankl argued,"is not a tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling of a worthwhile goal." Many believe that psychological health comes with the relief of distress. But Frankl proposed that all people-- and particularly those under some emotional weight-- need a purpose that will both draw on their talents and transcend their lives. For Lincoln, this sense of purpose was indeed the key that unlocked the gates of a mental prison. This doesn't mean his suffering went away. In fact, as his life became richer and more satisfying, his melancholy exerted a stronger pull. He now responded to that pull by tying it to his newly defined sense of purpose. From a place of trouble, he looked for meaning. He looked at imperfection and sought redemption.

Joshua Wolf Shenk

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

H.L. Mencken

Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.

James Richardson

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.

Jorge Luis Borges

Not all social animals are social with the same degree of commitment. In some species, the members are so tied to each other and interdependent as to seem the loosely conjoined cells of a tissue. The social insects are like this; they move, and live all their lives, in a mass; a beehive is a spherical animal. In other species, less compulsively social, the members make their homes together, pool resources, travel in packs or schools, and share the food, but any single one can survive solitary, detached from the rest. Others are social only in the sense of being more or less congenial, meeting from time to time in committees, using social gatherings as ad hoc occasions for feeding and breeding. Some animals simply nod at each other in passing, never reaching even a first-name relationship.

Lewis Thomas

Men are what their mothers made them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

… it is that such of us as have loved deeply have learnt many secrets that are unknown to others; for thousands and thousands of things quiver in silence on the lips of true friendship and love, that are not to be found in the silence of other lips, to which friendship and love are unknown. …

Maurice Maeterlinck

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them.

Walter Benjamin

The effect of male-identification means ‘internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of one’s self and one’s sex… Male identification is the act whereby women place men above women, including themselves, in credibility, status, and importance in most situations, regardless of the comparative quality the women may bring to the situation…. Interaction with women is seen as a lesser form of relating on every level.

Adrienne Rich

Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.

Claudia Rankine

And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others.

Plutarch

In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific "The Open Boat," and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls.

David Foster Wallace

Deceit dispels the boredom of the Absolute.

Dejan Stojanovic

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one no less wise to balance it.

George Santayana

They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks.Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatias.

Barbara Kingsolver

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Thomas Carlyle

The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people.

Logan Pearsall Smith

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