Top 278 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Essayists - Page 2

Genius can do much, but even genius falls short of the actuality of a single human life.

A fad lives its life in a few weeks; a philosophy lives through generations and centuries; a principle, forever.

I can’t think of a more philosophical time in a person’s life than when they are children. It’s the one time when ideas are really beautiful and amazing and all-encompassing. They are life.

There are times when a man should be content with what he has but never with what he is

True citizens are not the audience of their government, nor its consumers; they are its makers.

A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from times and tasks more fruitful than his toil has been.

The question for each man to settle is not what he would do if he had the means, time, influence and educational advantages, but what he will do with the things he has.

The circumstance that any man could suppose that Matthew when he said, 'Jacob begat Joseph,' or Luke, when he said, 'Joseph was the son of Heli' could refer to the wife of the one, or the daughter-in-law of the other, shows to what desperate stratagems polemical orthodoxy will resort in order to defend an untenable position.

In terms of a "career," I never have long-term plans, and certainly don't want to spend several years, say, writing a "long" novel.

Religion is 'twixt God and my own soul, Nor saint, nor sage, can boundless thought control.

No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.

Wit is an unexpected explosion of thought.

Worry is forethought gone to seed.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Genius is intensity of life; an overflowing vitality which floods and fertilizes a continent or a hemisphere of being; which makes a nature many-sided and whole, while most men remain partial and fragmentary.

Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.

The man who has a certain religious belief and fears to discuss it, lest it may be proved wrong, is not loyal to his belief, he has but a coward's faithfulness to his prejudices. If he were a lover of truth, he would be willing at any moment to surrender his belief for a higher, better, and truer faith.

Historical truth is that, and that alone, which reveals the forces that go to mould the social life of mankind.

"Little magazines" are, for the most part, the mayflies of the literary world.

Winston Churchill led the life that many men would love to live. He survived 50 gunfights and drank 20,000 bottles of champagne. [...] And of course, by resisting Hitler, he saved Europe and perhaps the world.

An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.

The gift finds the man attractive who stands with an empty bowl he does not own.

It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling — or new. The character itself of being startling, spectacular, or upsetting has become conventionalized, part of safe good taste.

Kaethe Schwehn's poignant memoir explores longing, both spiritual and physical, community and faith, in prose that is calm, lovely, and filled with clear-eyed honesty and grace. Tailings is simply an exquisite book.

Felicity, not fluency of language, is a merit.

For me, the main inspiration to write a story or novel is the voice of its central character, or the narrative voice of the story itself.

I wish to be a cat. I like to imagine I was a cat in a past life.

Everybody knows that fanaticism is religion caricatured; bears, indeed, about the same relation to it that a monkey bears to a man; yet, with many, contempt of fanaticism is received as a sure sign of hostility to religion.

Whenever you find humour, you find pathos close by its side.

This Moses, I say, this man of old time, whose existence and character you are trying to elucidate, matters to nobody but scholars like you.

We can't ignore the fact that ahead of us is a great war and this war is going to need significant preparation.

I've always liked the fact that fiction takes all these pretty unquantifiable human feelings and experiences and projects them onto the page in ways that make interior human sense, even when they aren't entirely believable...

In Kafka we have the modern mind, seemingly self-sufficient, intelligent, skeptical, ironical, splendidly trained for the great game of pretending that the world it comprehends in sterilized sobriety is the only and ultimate real one – yet a mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham. Thus he knows Two things at once, and both with equal assurance: that there is no God, and that there must be God.

Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.

Heaven alone, not earth, is destined to witness the repose of faith.

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.

Cats connote sexuality in standard dream dictionaries.

I pay attention as much as I can. I try to surround myself with other women with magical powers and a lot falls under the heading "magical powers."

I think of a myth as a story that helps you explain all the different pieces of your life. In that broad sense, there is no way to live without mythology.

Barbarism is not the inheritance of our pre-history. It is the companion that dogs our every step.

Every time I start off a book or a story I feel like I'm developing a new style or approach for that individual story alone, and it sometimes feels as if readers are looking for the same style/approach from the same writer over and over again, which hasn't helped me in the publishing biz.

The germs of all truth lie in the soul, and when the ripe moment comes, the truth within answers to the fact without as the flower responds to the sun, giving it form for heat and color for light.

We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners.

The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.

Worry is discounting possible future sorrows so that the individual may have present misery.

We are used to thinking of the Arabs as primitive men of the desert, as a donkey-like nation that neither sees nor understands what is going around it. But this is a GREAT ERROR. The Arab, like all sons of Sham, has sharp and crafty mind . . . Should time come when life of our people in Palestine imposes to a smaller or greater extent on the natives, they WILL NOT easily step aside.

Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't one today.

With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.

Were I to personify Justice, instead of presenting her blind, I would denominate her the goddess of fire. . . Of unbending integrity Justice should feel, hear and see; but truth alone should be the polar star by which she should shape her movements, and equity only should constrain her determinations.

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

God is glorified, not by our groans, but by our thanksgivings.

Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other things are secondary.

To be a great teacher, you can't simply be looking at how to earn your income. And with a priest or spiritual leader - there's another relationship that makes those lives what they are. And in each of these cases you'll find elements of gift exchange thriving, and you'll also find a tension around it.

What is it about a work of art, even when it is bought and sold in the market, that makes us distinguish it from . . . pure commodities? A work of art is a gift, not a commodity. . . works of art exist simultaneously in two “economies”, a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art.

All the events said to have been witnessed by John alone are omitted by John alone. This fact seems fatal either to the reality of the events in question or to the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel.

Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating.

History - that little sewer where man loves to wallow.

I love the good old book with glue and binding, I really do, but that is just one way of experiencing text, and suddenly we have so many new ways, including our laptops, our phones, our watches. People in my generation agonize over this. People much younger than me don't agonize at all. They just go ahead and find ways to transform publishing.

The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away.

Self-confidence without self-reliance is as useless as a cooking recipe without food. Self-confidence sees the possibilities of the individual; self-reliance realizes them. Self-confidence sees the angel in the unhewn block of marble; self-reliance carves it out for oneself.