Quotes by Essayists - Page 3

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it under its roof.
Barbara Kingsolver
The only reward of virtue is virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Humility is a virtue and it is a virtue innate in guests.
Max Beerbohm
Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Irresolution on the schemes of life I which offer themselves to our choice and inconstancy in pursuing them are the greatest causes of all unhappiness.
Joseph Addison
O Lord! Unhappy is the man whom man can make unhappy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are the only animals that devote themselves day in and day out to making one another unhappy.
H.L. Mencken
Unhappiness indicates wrong thinking just as ill health indicates a bad regimen.
Paul Bourget
One truth discovered one pang of regret at not being able to express it is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.
William Hazlitt
Don't be consistent but be simply true.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Rough work iconoclasm but the only way to get at the truth.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never have both.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is a difficult task Oh citizens to make speeches to the belly which has no ears.
Plutarch
The truth is cruel but it can be loved and it makes free those who have loved it.
George Santayana
Make yourself necessary to somebody.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.
E B White
Before he sets out the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
George Santayana
No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and ridiculous.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For thy sake tobacco I Would do anything but die.
Charles Lamb
Time is a great legalizer even in the field of morals.
H.L. Mencken
Nothing can be done except little by little.
Charles Baudelaire
Take your needle my child and work at your pattern it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like embroidery.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
If we take care of the inches we will not have to worry about the miles.
Hartley Coleridge
Life is a great bundle of little things.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Many things which cannot be overcome when they are together yield themselves up when taken little by little.
Plutarch
Time cools time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Thomas Mann
The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length on the other hand an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second.
Virginia Woolf
Time is a great legalizer even in the fields of morals.
H.L. Mencken
Time goes you say? Ah no! Alas Time stays we go.
Henry Austin Dobson
Enjoy the present hour Be thankful for the past And neither fear nor wish Th' approaches of the last.
Abraham Cowley
Horus non numero nisi serenas (I count only the sunny hours).
William Hazlitt
The only true time which a man can properly call his own is that which he has all to himself the rest though in some sense he may be said to live it is other people's time not his.
Charles Lamb
The moment of change is the only poem.
Adrienne Rich
To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work fun of the most exhausting sort.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.
William Hazlitt
To finish the moment to find the journey's end in every step of the road to live the greatest number of good hours is wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.
Paul Bourget
When thought becomes excessively painful action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie
Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. It is time to acknowledge this perhaps even to learn to do it better.
Lewis Thomas
The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for Nature to follow. Now we just set the clock an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.
E B White
I liked to sail alone. The sea was the same as a girl to me - I did not want anyone else along.
E B White
The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.
William Hazlitt
Live wastes itself while we are preparing to live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come.
Maurice Maeterlinck
We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent "here and now " without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
José Ortega y Gasset
The present like a note in music is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.
Walter Savage Landor
We can see well into the past we can guess shrewdly in to the future but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
With the past I have nothing to do nor with the future. I live now.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The present offers itself to our touch for only an instant of time and then eludes the senses.
Plutarch
The word "now" is like a bomb thrown through the window and it ticks.
Arthur Miller
The present is the living sum-total of the whole past.
Thomas Carlyle
The present is an eternal now.
Abraham Cowley
The present is all the ready money Fate can give.
Abraham Cowley
The present is an edifice which God cannot rebuild.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are here and it is now. Further than that all knowledge is moonshine.
H.L. Mencken
This time like all times is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
Virginia Woolf
The past is a work of art free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
Max Beerbohm