Top 278 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Essayists - Page 4

But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.

Art criticism, I would say, is about the most ungrateful form of 'elevated' writing I know of. It may also be one of the most challenging.. if only because so few people have done it well enough to be remembered.. but I'm not sure the challenge is worth it.

The precondition for kitsch, is the availability of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It draws its lifeblood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience

In fiction there can be no appeal to any authority outside the book itself. . . . the thing has to look true, and that is all. It is not made to look true by simple statement.

Every man has an atmosphere which is affecting every other.

A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.

Synchronicities fall under the "magic" heading to me.

It's as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on 'absolute' or 'autonomous' art: thus on visual art... that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not.

This "human thing" is the permanent process of seeking the sacred through revealing what is hidden. It is an ever ongoing and indefinite process of understanding and interpretation.

Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language via rhythm, syntax, image and metaphor. Reading it-the best of it-can create another, very different kind of perpetual present, an awareness that can be as ongoing in the soul as the stop-time of trauma.

Hypocrisy, false labels, can create slogans but no poems; propaganda but not life: there are no roots, there are no realities to nurture creative work.

I don't get into 'becauses.' When you come into a studio you see a number of works. My habit is to go to the one I like most. If you start to say, 'because,' you get into art jargon.

I enjoy entering the viewpoint of characters who are as different from myself as I can get - children, elderly women, animals, a sexy death row murderess - and to imagine how these disparate individuals see the world's cruelty and beauty and vastness.

Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is - among other things - continuity, and unthinkable without it.

For years (decades even), I genuinely believed that world would beat a path to my books and stories, but eventually, as everything I wrote went rapidly out of print and stayed there, I wised up and started assembling them in e-format editions...

I do not believe that the deeper problems of living can ever be answered by the process of thought. I believe that life itself teaches us either patience with regard to them, or reveals to us possible solutions when our hearts are pressed close against duties and sorrows and experiences of all kinds.

The women in my family - my grandmother and my mother - have been both sources of comfort and terror. Protection was not always available.

Man is incomprehensible without Nature and Nature is incomprehensible apart from man. For the delicate loveliness of the flower is as much in the human eye as in its own fragile petals and in the splendor of the heavens as much in the imagination that kindles at the touch of their glory as in the shining of countless worlds.

I’ve always liked edges, places where one thing becomes another…… transition zones, boundaries and borderlands. I like the mixing that happens, the juxtapositions, the collisions and connections. I like the way they help me see the world from a fresh angle.

It's the same things your whole life. 'Clean up your room!', 'Stand up straight!', 'Pick up your feet!', 'Take it like a man!', 'Be nice to your sister!', 'Don't mix beer and wine, ever!'. Oh yeah, 'Don't drive on the railroad track!'

Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.

I love indices! They are poetry in and of themselves, depending on the book.

The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.

The possibilities for mobilizing the experience, imaginations, and intelligence of workers, both employed and unemployed, are limitless.

What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.

Perhaps we can never understand our own children, because there is too much of ourselves inside there, or perhaps we are just blinded by the illusion that there is so much of ourselves inside of them.

Kitsch is deceptive. It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light.

Life is simply time given to man to learn how to live.

Life is the offspring of death.

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

We hail science as man's truest friend and noblest helper.

Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.

A large picture can give us images of things, but a relatively small one can best re-create the instantaneous unity of nature as a view - the unity of which the eyes take in at a single glance.

Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against, not with, the wind.

Tears are copiously showered over frailties the discoverer takes a malicious delight in circulating; and thus, all granite on one side of the heart, and all milk on the other, the unsexed scandal-monger hies from house to house, pouring balm from its weeping eyes on the wounds it inflicts with its stabbing tongue.

We are each born into a situation-a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation-and born into the stories told of each of these.

The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved.

In solitude all great things are born.

The military mind tends to be conservative, realistic and historical. The civilian mind tends to be liberal, idealistic and Utopian. Journalists, obviously, are civilians, and they tend to distrust, and to suspect, the military's motives.

The tortured always remain tortured.

Man does not drift into goodness...the chance port of an aimless voyage. He must fight ever for his destination.

A cottage will hold as much happiness as would stock a palace.

Everything that is great in life is the product of slow growth; the newer, and greater, and higher, and nobler the work, the slower is its growth, the surer is its lasting success. Mushrooms attain their full power in a night; oaks require decades. A fad lives its life in a few weeks; a philosophy lives through generations and centuries.

The question for each man to settle is not what he would do if he had means, time, influence and educational advantages; the question is what he will do with the things he has. The moment a young man ceases to dream or to bemoan his lack of opportunities and resolutely looks his conditions in the face, and resolves to change them, he lays the corner-stone of a solid and honorable success.

Overwhelm, panic, and wanting to flee were states of being in my everyday life as I tried to figure out life on my own, in the city I had grown up in, after an entire life made in Olympia, Washington for the eight years previous.

When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts.

Nature is very un-American. Nature never hurries.

The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.

Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one's way anew from the materials at hand.

If you want to change your art, change your habits.

Cheerfulness in most cheerful people is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.

My advice to writers: thank goodness we can revise and adjust and tighten and rethink before going public with our words. Revision is our friend. Our best friend. I love revision.

New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.

Most Americans are aware of the brutality and injustice used to maintain the excesses of their selfish consumer society and empire. Yet I suspect...they do not care. They don’t want to see what is done in their name. They do not want to look at the rows of flag-draped coffins, the horribly maimed bodies and faces of veterans, or the human suffering in the blighted and deserted former manufacturing centers. It is too upsetting. Government and corporate censorship is therefore welcomed and appreciated.

There is no kind obondage which life lays upon us that may not yield both sweetness and strength; and nothing reveals a man's character more fully than the spirit in which he bears his limitations.

Decoration is asked to be 'merely' pleasing, 'merely' embellishing, and the 'functional' logic of Modernism leaves no room, apparently, for such 'mereness.' This is part of the pity of Modernism, one of the sacrifices it enjoins.

Kitsch is Mechanical and operates by formulas.

Nature does not capriciously scatter her secrets as golden gifts to lazy pets and luxurious darlings, but imposes tasks when she presents opportunities, and uplifts him whom she would inform. The apple that she drops at the feet of Newton is but a coy invitation to follow her to the stars.

The less their ability, the more their conceit.

There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author's personal character by the character of his works. We find it difficult to understand the common antithesis of a good writer and a bad man.