Quotes by Essayists - Page 4

The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.
Gabriel Zaid
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
If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.
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
Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
Salman Rushdie
He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.
Jonathan Franzen
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
Will be but corpses dressed in frocks, who cannot speak to birds or rocks.
Gary Snyder
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.
Elizabeth Alexander
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
Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious—surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
Walt Whitman
Search for the stranger inside you, forgotten even by your death.
Sorin Cerin
I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen.
David Foster Wallace
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
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H.L. Mencken
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
There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky.
Dejan Stojanovic
I visited many places, Some of them quite Exotic and far away, But I always returned to myself.
Dejan Stojanovic
Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness of our life depends on so little.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Deliver thunder, GodIf you choose not to talk.
Dejan Stojanovic
Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness.
Dejan Stojanovic
In Western Civilization, our elders are books.
Gary Snyder
Different languages, the same thoughts; servant to thoughts and their masters.
Dejan Stojanovic
when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
George Steiner
A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.
H.L. Mencken
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