Quotes by Essayists - Page 2

Every author however modest keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Logan Pearsall Smith
I think with my right hand.
Edmund Wilson
What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Strong men greet war tempest hard times. They wish as Pindar said to tread the floors of hell with necessities as hard as iron.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains losses and disappointments but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.
Joseph Addison
Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
E. M. Cioran
And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What torments of grief you endured from evils that never arrived.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?
Maurice Maeterlinck
Some of your hurts you have cured And the sharpest you still have survived But what torments of grief you endured From the evil which never arrived.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.
Arnold Bennett
I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. "Never worry about your heart 'til it stops beating."
E B White
Good-bye proud world! I'm going home Thou are not my friend I am not thine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women's art though created in solitude wells up out of community. There is clearly both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused and an explosion of creative energy bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
Adrienne Rich
Give me a man who sings at his work.
Thomas Carlyle
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Some people are born to lift heavy weights some are born to juggle golden balls.
Max Beerbohm
The high prize of life the crowning fortune of man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Congenial labor is essence of happiness.
Arthur Christopher Benson
Rest is the sweet sauce of labour.
Plutarch
It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate whose faithful work will answer for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work that disagreeable thing is the only way of not suffering in life or at all events of suffering less.
Charles Baudelaire
Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.
Thomas Carlyle
He that can work is a born king of something.
Thomas Carlyle
No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.
Max Beerbohm
Unionism seldom if ever uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.
H.L. Mencken
As a remedy against all ills - poverty sickness and melanchol - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work.
Charles Baudelaire
Everything considered work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Charles Baudelaire
All work is seed sown. It grows and spreads and sows itself anew.
Thomas Carlyle
Speech is civilization itself. The word even the most contradictory word preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.
Thomas Mann
When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as the poetry of sentences.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Words like eyeglasses blur everything that they do not make clear.
Joseph Joubert
Words will build no walls.
Plutarch
Words that weep and tears that speak.
Abraham Cowley
Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wonder is the basis of worship.
Thomas Carlyle
Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no such thing as a long piece of work except one that you dare not start.
Charles Baudelaire
Man has his will - but woman has her way.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
H.L. Mencken
If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance very various heroic and mean splendid and sordid infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme as great as a man some think even better.
Virginia Woolf
But what is woman? Only one of nature's agreeable blunders.
Abraham Cowley
Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are perhaps the most discussed animal in the universe?
Virginia Woolf
A woman's strength is the irresistible might of weakness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wit is the salt of conversation not the food.
William Hazlitt
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one no less wise to balance it.
George Santayana
A wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interests than it is theirs to find his weak point.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance arms us with terrible freedom so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge yet not the details but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful manly part or a poor drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions they have a substantial truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I was born with a chronic anxiety about the weather.
John Burroughs
It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
Logan Pearsall Smith
The first wealth is health.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are few sorrows however poignant in which a good income is of no avail.
Logan Pearsall Smith
By the rude bridge that arched the flood Their flag to April's breeze unfurl'd Here once the embattl'd farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Imagination has always had powers of resurrection that no science can match.
Ingrid Bengis
We are governed not by armies but by ideas.
Mona Caird
When there is no vision people perish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A fair day's wages for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of government.
Thomas Carlyle
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace And saw within the moonlight in his room Making it rich and like a lily in bloom An angel writing in a book of gold Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold And to the presence in the room he said - "What writest thou?" The Vision raised its head And with a look made all of sweet accord Answered "The names of those who love the Lord."
Leigh Hunt
It is in our idleness in our dreams that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf