Quotes by Essayists - Page 3

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Virginia Woolf
The immense success of our life, is I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.
Virginia Woolf
Two things form the bedrock of any open society — freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free cou
Salman Rushdie
Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
Edward Abbey
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H.L. Mencken
How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
Salman Rushdie
And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive hiding in the cellar from his faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (Hanif's dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then
Salman Rushdie
If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.
Anne Fadiman
No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
Walter Benjamin
No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.
Walter Benjamin
The clock sweats out each minuteof what meat is left to us.
Joseph Bathanti
There is only as much space, only as much time, Only as much desire, only as many words, Only as many pages, only as much ink To accept all of us at light-speed Hurrying into the Promised Land Of oblivion that is waiting for us sooner or later.
Dejan Stojanovic
Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you.
Salman Rushdie
Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!
Thomas Carlyle
A society which sees her modesty or her "hang-ups" as a problem is necessarily a society which will not be able to get him to commit. Conversely, a society which respected modesty, or what now goes by "hang-ups", was one in which men were obligated.
Wendy Shalit
(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.
Thomas Carlyle
You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes.
Dejan Stojanovic
Total knowledge is annihilation Of the desire to see, to touch, to feel The world sensed only through senses And immune to the knowledge without feeling.
Dejan Stojanovic
The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in "Olalla" when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand.
Jorge Luis Borges
I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.
Cheryl Strayed
In summer the empire of insects spreads.
Adam Zagajewski
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
Virginia Woolf
Search for the stranger inside you, forgotten even by your death.
Sorin Cerin
poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you
Walt Whitman
When the star dies, Its eye closes; tired of watching, It flies back to its first bright dream.
Dejan Stojanovic
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
Virginia Woolf
The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and gives the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragment of wisdom. The one who hears takes the story in, even to a place not visible or conscious to the mind, yet there. In this inner place a story from another life suffers a subtle change. As it enters the memory of the listener it is augmented by reflection, by other memories, and even the body hearing and responding in the moment of the telling. By such transmissions, consciousness is woven.
Susan Griffin
I visited many places, Some of them quite Exotic and far away, But I always returned to myself.
Dejan Stojanovic
Deliver thunder, GodIf you choose not to talk.
Dejan Stojanovic
Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness.
Dejan Stojanovic
Different languages, the same thoughts; servant to thoughts and their masters.
Dejan Stojanovic
It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.
H.L. Mencken
Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A mighty pain to love it is,And 't is a pain that pain to miss;But of all pains, the greatest painIt is to love, but love in vain.
Abraham Cowley