Quotes by Essayists - Page 8

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.

Marilynne Robinson

Who has chosen this kind world for us and why?

Sorin Cerin

... It happened very fast. And now that he's dead he can't remember pain. It's as if he'd never existed.'He wanted her to believe this, but he wasn't sure he believed it himself. If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it.

Jonathan Franzen

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

Jorge Luis Borges

I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.

Adrienne Rich

Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.

Steve Almond

Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orc

Walt Whitman

The embrace of essential beastliness, made scientific and respectable by a reading of Darwin that may or may not have done justice to his intentions, thrilled and enthralled Western thought in certain quarters and in fact still does enthrall persons and groups that experience live in society as a barely tolerable constraint on a kind of freedom they consider a birthright. This freedom appears to have most of the essential features of a war of each against all, whether a hot war that compels them to go armed to Starbucks or to church or a cold war that makes a virtue of craftiness and guile, the ability to loot and wreck the national economy without getting caught.

Marilynne Robinson

I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.

Salman Rushdie

I dalje verujem da Sunce izlazi svakoga dana i da svako novo Sunce najavljuje novi dan;dan koji je juče bio budućnost. I dalje verujem da će današnji dan, u trenutku zatvaranja jedne stranice vremena, obećati sutra – ranije nepredvidivo, kasnije neponovljivo

Carlos Fuentes

Pray calm yourselves. I have eleven children, and I am twenty-six times a grandma, and I have seen them all through their silly seasons, and when it come on them they will run the Devil bowlegged keeping up with their mischief. I think she'll wake when she tires of it. A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.

Arthur Miller

Nobility is not only in forgiveness.

Dejan Stojanovic

Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.

Logan Pearsall Smith

It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.

Nick Hornby

Yes, but does Maine have anything to SAY to Florida?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.

Thomas Carlyle

It is in games that many men discover their paradise.

Robert Lynd

The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.

Virginia Woolf

Now students all seem to be converging on the same self, the successful upper-middle-class professional, impersonating the adult they've already decided they want to become.

William Deresiewicz

Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.

Barry López

We owe our liberation to chemistry," he went on. "For all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells. Seeing me, you actually experience a disturbance in the sodium-potassium equilibrium across your neuron membranes. So all we have todo is send a few well-chosen molecules down into those cortical mitochondria, activate the right neurohumoral-synaptic transmission effector sites, and your fondest dreams come true. But you knowall this," he concluded, subdued.

Stanisław Lem

Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.

Osip Mandelstam

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

Virginia Woolf

I visit the orchards of God and look at the spheric productAnd look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green.

Walt Whitman

... in art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.

Jorge Luis Borges

Truly they who know still know nothing if the strength of love be not theirs; for the true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind. He who sees without loving is only straining his eyes in the darkness.

Maurice Maeterlinck

When magic through nerves and reason passes, Imagination, force, and passion will thunder. The portrait of the world is changed.

Dejan Stojanovic

he was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it...

Nick Hornby

Believing in what you don't know is as true as believing in what you know as long as your life is just an illusion.

Sorin Cerin

It is difficult to make a reputation, but is even more difficult seriously to mar a reputation once properly made --- so faithful is the public.

Arnold Bennett

In Woody Allen movies people stood in line for Ingmar Bergman films or Holocaust documentaries talking up media theory to pass the time. At 16 that was my idea of fun. Now that I live in New York I can tell you that people lined up for tickets don't debate theory. They talk about cute guys at the gym or whether or not they live within walking distance of a Krispy Kreme. I was such a young fogy that growing up involved becoming less mature.

Sarah Vowell

Cultivo una rosa blanca,En julio como en enero,Para el amigo sinceroQue me da su mano franca.Y para el cruel que me arrancaEl corazon con que vivo,Cardo ni oruga cultivoCultivo una rosa blanca.I have a white rose to tendIn July as in January;I give it to the true friendWho offers his frank hand to me.And to the cruel one whose blowsBreak the heart by which I live,Thistle nor thorn do I give:For him, too, I have a white rose.

José Martí

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be "consistent."

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.

Jonathan Franzen

I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I'd go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn't want it.

Sarah Vowell

I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.

Georges Duhamel

Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,In spider’s web a truth discerning,Attach one silken strand to youFor my returning.

E B White

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them.

Flannery O'Connor

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

Russell Banks

First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

Virginia Woolf

A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

Charles Péguy

To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.

Edward Abbey

Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die which is man's charter of nobility.

George Santayana

I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.

Chuck Klosterman

To knock a thing down especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight to the blood.

George Santayana

Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song,Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.

Charles Baudelaire

We look wishfully to emergencies to eventful revolutionary times ... and think how easy to have taken our part when the drum was rolling and the house was burning over our heads.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

... a man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn't have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing.

Pico Iyer

I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.

Stanisław Lem

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

Flannery O'Connor

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

Anne Carson

The world's a scene of changes and to be constant in nature is inconstancy.

Abraham Cowley

If what we think of ourselves were true, the planet would overflow with geniuses.

Dejan Stojanovic

On a morning like this, fear is a blue sky emptied of birds.

Fran Wilde

I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.

Siri Hustvedt

The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.

Walter Savage Landor

The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought --to call it by a prouder name than it deserved-- had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until --you know the little tug -- the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.

Virginia Woolf

There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success.

Max Beerbohm

Previous 1 … 6 7 8 9 10 … 25 Next