Top 278 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Essayists

As men neither fear nor respect what has been made contemptible, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as well as detestable. Armies cannot protect it then; and walls which have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt.

Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.

We know nothing of the trials, sorrows and temptations of those around us, of pillows wet with sobs, of the life-tragedy that may be hidden behind a smile, of the secret cares, struggles, and worries that shorten life and leave their mark in hair prematurely whitened, and a character changed and almost recreated in a few days. Let us not dare to add to the burden of another the pain of our judgment.

The gift moves towards the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns towards him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us. Social nature abhors a vacuum.

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.

Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don't just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity. The printed page becomes a kind of wrought-iron fence we crawl through, returning, once we have wandered, to the very place we started.

The body, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is very firm and intact. It's the only promise we can count on, and we can't really count on it very much.

My relationship with my mother has always felt like the most complicated relationship of my life. I know I have a lot more writing to do on this.

More than the Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.

Science is teaching man to know and reverence truth, and to believe that only so far as he knows and loves it can he live worthily on earth, and vindicate the dignity of his spirit.

Exercise the muscles that compassionately open the heart.In your writing and your life.

Let there be then no coercion established in society, and the common law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into their proper places.

One of the things about living in the shadow of a suicide is that everyone involved is going to have some guilt, is going to wonder, 'What could I have done? What could I have said?'

Let us be clear: censorship is cowardice. ... It masks corruption. It is a school of torture: it teaches, and accustoms one to the use of force against an idea, to submit thought to an alien "other." But worst still, censorship destroys criticism, which is the essential ingredient of culture.

Consider the death of Princess Diana. This accident involved an English citizen, with an Egyptian boyfriend, crashed in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian, who was drunk on Scotch whiskey, followed closely by Italian paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles, and finally treated with Brazilian medicines by an American doctor. In this case, even leaving aside the fame of the victims, a mere neighborhood canvass would hardly have completed the forensic picture, as it might have a generation before.

Ephemerality is the little magazine's generic fate; by promptly dying it gives proof that it remained loyal to its first program.

I am about to - or I am going to - die; either expression is correct.

Beyond doubt, the most salient characteristic of life in this latter half of the 19th Century is its SPEED

The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.

Goodness often blossoms like roses on very rickety trellis-work, and beauty can grow out of nonsense.

Another way of approaching the thing is to consider it unnamed, unnameable.

Be careful how you interpret the world: It is like that.

The stamping out of the artist is one of the blind goals of every civilization. When a civilization becomes so standardized that the individual can no longer make an imprint on it, then that civilization is dying. The mass mind has taken over and another set of national glories is heading for history's scrap heap.

Anyone can be a teacher or professor, but not everyone can influence you to strive for excellence and make a difference in the world around you.

Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power. Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language, a man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules.

It often happens that the quotations constitute the most valuable part of a book.

. . . since being a Jew not only means that I bear within me a catastrophe that occurred yesterday and cannot be ruled out for tomorrow, it is-beyond being a duty-also fear. Every morning when I get up I can read the Auschwitz number on my forearm, something that touches the deepest and most closely intertwined roots of my existence; indeed I am not even sure if this is not my entire existence. Then I feel approximately as I did back then when I got a taste of the first blow from a policeman's fist. Every day anew I lose my trust in the world.

There are almost no beautiful cities in America, though there are many beautiful parts of cities, and some sections that are glorious without being beautiful, like downtown Chicago. Cities are too big and too rich for beauty; they have outgrown themselves too many times.

If the world is cold, make it your business to build fires.

Humor is... despair refusing to take itself seriously.

To me, magic is everywhere.

To have a quiet mind is to possess one's mind wholly; to have a calm spirit is to possess one's self.

A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong. You cannot, by tying an opinion, to a man's tongue, make him the representative of that opinion; and at the close of any battle for principles, his name will be found neither among the dead nor among the wounded, but among the missing.

When you don't like something the words come more readily.

An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.

We are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved.

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

We carry our house plants from one window to another to give them the proper heat, light, and moisture. Should we not be at least as careful of ourselves?

Nothing is lost upon a man who is bent upon growth; nothing wasted on one who is always preparing for - life by keeping eyes, mind and heart open to nature, men, books, experience - and what he gathers serves him at unexpected moments in unforeseen ways.

The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.

Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.

The human condition ... is defined by the aspiration to always supersede oneself, which in turn requires nonconformity.

Can anything be more absurd than keeping women in a state of ignorance, and yet so vehemently to insist on their resisting temptation?

Words will never fully capture what is alive in our hearts.It would be a shame, though, if we denied our bears their dancing.

Mirth is a Proteus, changing its shape and manner with the thousand diversities of individual character, from the most superfluous gayety to the deepest, moat earnest humor.

Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document and act as a work of art as well.

Complete honesty has nothing to do with 'purity' or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart.

A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space.

Love, in the divine alchemy of life, transmutes all duties into privileges, all responsibilities into joys.

Philosophical systems? Even the most impressive of them are uncomfortably seated on a throne of rock bottom stupidity, that self-inflicted narrow-mindness which renders a mind capable of believing that it, a part of the immense world, could absolute

Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment; imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all.

It is better to go down on the great seas which human hearts were made to sail than to rot at the wharves in ignoble anchorage.

The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.

I read books to read myself.

A gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation.

True wisdom, indeed, springs from the wide brain which is fed from the deep heart; and it is only when age warms its withering conceptions at the memory of its youthful fire, when it makes experience serve aspiration, and knowledge illumine the difficult paths through which thoughts thread their way into facts,--it is only then that age becomes broadly and nobly wise.

Any revolution which denies the right to criticize is bound to wallow in stagnation and backwardness.

Pretension is nothing; power is everything.

The right place for the League of Nations is not Geneva or the Hague, Ascher Ginsberg has dreamed of a Temple on Mount Zion where the representatives of all nations should dedicate a Temple of Eternal Peace. Only when all peoples of the earth shall go to THIS temple as pilgrims is eternal peace to become a fact.

No good act performed in the world ever dies. Science tells us that no atom of matter can ever be destroyed, that no force once started ever ends; it merely passes through a multiplicity of ever-changing phases. Every good deed done to others is a great force that starts an unending pulsation through time and eternity. We may not know it, we may never hear a word of gratitude or recognition, but it will all come back to us in some form as naturally, as perfectly, as inevitably, . . . as echo answers to sound.