Top 1200 Personal Essays Quotes & Sayings

The interesting thing about that is one of the greatest critics of socialism and leftwing writings was Robert Michels who wrote a series of essays called "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" and in these essays he discusses how no matter what sorts of freedoms are advertised or put into a society structure, that all societies, all form of governments - whether they be a Roman republic, whether they be a democracy, whether they be a Russian communist system, whatever, a tribe... a tribal council - all of the continuously, throughout the ages, have all converted back into an oligarchy.

When you go back and look at what people say about my essays, they're always going, 'What is this?' Because they're not exactly like other people's essays... The approach is not at all the recognized approach of a non-fiction writer. It's not linear. It isn't pyramidally based on fact.

While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.

I was at Sussex University studying English lit and philosophy, I had two essays due in and three seminars that day, and at the same time I was messaging my manager because I'd just started to put together the pieces of like, 'Wow. I really don't want to be doing any essays anymore. Why don't I just give this music thing a go?'

As far as I can tell, writing the essays didn't change the way I wrote poetry. Although the essays contain scattered passages that might be called lyrical, they often contain closed statements of what is only suggested in the poetry.

I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

I think those women who get themselves to write essays, it's not an easy thing to do because as women, you're not encouraged to think; you're encouraged to feel. This is a broad, broad statement. So I think those women who go out on a limb and publish essays are highly conscious of how they are writing their opinions.

I aspire to write what are called 'familiar essays.' They begin in the personal and end in the universal. It's not for me to say if I have been successful at it. But that is the hope.

I'm really into short-story collections and essays; they're my jam.

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.

My presence isn't simply about "character" - I'm present in every part and particle of the thing, in the sound and rhythm of the sentences, in the shifting tones and the selection of details, in the comedy, the sadness, and the confusion. For the space of an essay, I'm the air you breathe, everywhere and nowhere. With a personal essay, I don't think you'd want it any other way. You ought to have the sense of an encounter, the impression of having met someone. In my essays, for better or worse, that someone is me.

I think my blog is fairly circumspect and elliptical. I've written personal essays, but they are short and to the point: in and out, and that's that.

Queen songs tend to be about very personal things: personal dreams and personal ambitions.

All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

In the early 60s, you read your essays to your supervisor rather than hand them in. I was both lazy and clever, and realised I didn't need to write essays at all, I could simply talk with some notes in front of me.

I feel like I want to keep moving toward idiosyncracy. Personal, personal, personal.

I think, we can only write very personal matters through our experience. When I named my first novel about my son "A Personal Matter," I believe I knew the most important thing: there is not any personal matter; we must find the link between ourselves, our "personal matter," and society.

If you're involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it's bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.

Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.

I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.

If you look on Amazon - if you do a search for personal finance, there are literally 20,000 books written on personal finance, and there's no real reason for it. I mean, personal finance is pretty simple.

Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book...

I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications.

When it comes to the personal essays I write, I just convince myself that no one will ever read them.

I enjoy writing personal essays in the way of Charles Lamb because it goes back to the school days when I was good in writing essays.

My movies are painfully personal, but I'm never trying to let you know how personal they are. It's my job to make it be personal, and also to disguise that so only I or the people who know me know how personal it is. 'Kill Bill' is a very personal movie.

Shorter work - personal essays and book reviews - allow me to take a break from working on a book, which is good for the book and for its author.

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

The memoir was a very personal book. I wrote it as a personal journey and search about who my father was and how my family had come together and come apart - sorting all that out, you know, issues of personal identity.

I could write another collection of personal essays from what has happened to me in the last year alone. I don't seek out my material - it finds me. I am magnetic, somehow.

I'd written personal essays before, but never on this scale -- never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen).

Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it.

I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay. I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness. Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.

My passion is capturing what it feels like to love, be it romantic or otherwise. I love to watch two people realize what they meant for each other - and that goes across all media, books, TV, movies, personal essays; everything.

I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.

For years following the death of my mother, I wanted to write about her. I started writing what I thought of as personal essays about growing up as her child, but I never could finish any of them. I think I was too close to that loss, and too eager to try and resolve things, to make her death make sense.

Each of the essays in this volume ranges widely across technical and philosophical domains. They examine both familiar automatons from throughout history and delight us with yet more that will likely be unfamiliar to most readers. But the real treat of the essays is how they will make Artificial Life researchers squirm as they recognize their own intellectual sleights of hand exposed for all to see. Those researchers and the Genesis Redux contributors are all ultimately interested in what it is that truly distinguishes us beings from other lumps of matter.

I don't believe in writing for goals, or else I'd write essays.

In American Romances, her new book of essays, Rebecca Brown has a voice that is full of pop references, family stories, and the fruits of a lifetime of -- in her perfect phrase - extreme reading. The voice is a hoot, and it is dead serious. This is writing with exquisite control, fully up to the task Brown takes on of playing a fierce game of beach ball with deep problems of American (and personal) history and identity.

The process has now run full circle: Preaching originates in personal counseling; preaching is personal counseling on a group basis; personal counseling originates in preaching. Personal counseling imparts to the preacher a practical familiarity with human nature which he would not otherwise obtain.

Personal power is a feeling that everybody is looking for called satisfaction. It is different from enlightenment, but you need personal power to become enlightened. Personal power is not the end of the process.

If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur.

Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone's either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays.

You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.

The Restless Anthropologist is a rich, powerful, and compulsively readable collection of essays by anthropologists who look back at the multiple relationships between their serial fieldwork experiences and their lives. Illustrating the dense interweaving of the personal and the professional that is the hallmark of anthropology as a vocation, these essays are at once affectively deep reflections, and clear-eyed assessments, of lives often lived 'between here and there.' Alma Gottlieb's idea to stimulate these articles and bring together this collection was inspired.

Getting up for sadhana in the morning is a totally selfish act - for personal strength, for personal intuition, for personal sharpness, for personal discipline, and overall for absolute personal prosperity.

I don't like writing essays or theory.

Personal development is your springboard to personal excellence. Ongoing, continuous, non-stop personal development literally assures you that there is no limit to what you can accomplish.

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

Nowadays I imagine people find freer and more accepting venues in blogs, on Tumblr and Instagram and Facebook, in the riot of shouting that trails in the wake of every news story. So there's always the pandemonium of the Internet, if you need to get your lunatic opinions out in public. I find most of that stuff a little insane-making and my preference is to encounter personal essays in the relatively sedate and stable universe of print, in literary quarterlies, magazines and books. But I'm sure you can find plenty of good stuff in lonely outposts all across the World Wide Web.

A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination." Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm... all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.

I got to take classes in writing with a fountain pen, and actually, something you make is your own textbook. So, while you're learning about something, you have to write essays on it, and then you handwrite in cursive, in fountain pen, your essays out on beautiful paper and you bind it together into a book that you hand in at the end of the course.

Stanford's law school application wasn't the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren't a loser.

I believe in it, and I trust it too and treasure it above everything, the personal, the personal, the personal! I put my faith in it not only as the source, the ground of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.

When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.

I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery. Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream.

In my new book, 'Binge,' I share essays about everything I've never told my viewers - touching on the best and worst days of my life, some hilarious, some embarrassing, but all extremely personal.

I don't know if I have a book in me, but I'm sure I have more essays.