Quotes by Essayists - Page 6

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself I am large I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman
To penetrate one's being one must go armed to the teeth.
Paul Valéry
Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors or to see themselves as others see them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
I am as bad as the worst but thank God I am as good as the best.
Walt Whitman
A sick man that gets talking about himself a woman that gets talking about her baby and an author that begins reading out of his own book never know when to stop.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
What the collective age wants allows and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.
Thomas Mann
If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
George Santayana
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
H.L. Mencken
Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament not of income.
Logan Pearsall Smith
There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago but it is put to better use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science is nothing but developed perception interpreted intent common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
George Santayana
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
George Santayana
I pay the School Master but 'tis the school boys that educate my son.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled.
George Santayana
Outside among your fellows among strangers you must preserve appearances a hundred things you cannot do but inside the terrible freedom!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sanity is very rare every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators.
William Hazlitt
Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
William Hazlitt
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
Thomas Carlyle
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
Arthur Miller
Every noble crown is and on Earth will forever be a crown of thorns.
Thomas Carlyle
Imitation is a necessity of human nature.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood.
Plutarch
Speaking of Ted Turner The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
Charles Du Bos
We may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.
Randolph Bourne
An individual dies ... when instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being he cowers within and takes refuge there.
E. M. Cioran
All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him if he front it not bravely it will keep its word.
Thomas Carlyle
As soon as there is life there is danger.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not be too timid and squeamish. ... All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We may fail of our happiness strive we ever so bravely but we are less likely to fail if we measure with judgment our chances and our capabilities.
Agnes Repplier
Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every person is responsible for all the good within the scope of his abilities and for no more.
Gail Hamilton
The great law of culture: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
Thomas Carlyle
The high prize of life the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
Flannery O'Connor
All life is the struggle the effort to be itself.
José Ortega y Gasset
The moment that any life however good stifles you you may be sure it isn't your real life.
Arthur Christopher Benson
We had as lief not be as not be ourselves.
William Hazlitt
People are ridiculous only when they try or seem to be that which they are not.
Giacomo Leopardi
Of all the paths a man could strike into there is at any given moment a best path ... a thing which here and now it were of all things wisest for him to do ... to find this path and walk in it is the one thing needful for him.
Thomas Carlyle
Ah if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is essential to the triumph of reform that it shall never succeed.
William Hazlitt
All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.
Thomas Carlyle
Every reform was once a private opinion and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work stretch out in the sun and scratch himself.
H.L. Mencken
Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Apology - a desperate habit and one that is rarely cured.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
No sensible person ever made an apology.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
His religion at best is an anxious wish - like that of Rebelais a great Perhaps.
Thomas Carlyle
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
H.L. Mencken
A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone somewhere may be having a good time.
H.L. Mencken
My atheism like that of Spinoza is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.
George Santayana
There is a crack in everything God has made.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.
H.L. Mencken
Each religion by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
George Santayana
The merit claimed for the Anglican Church is that if you let it alone it will let you alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men are idolaters and want something to look at and kiss and hug or throw themselves down before they always did they always will and if you don't make it of wood you must make it of words.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A minister is coming down every generation nearer and nearer to the common level of the useful citizen - no oracle at all but a man of more than average moral instincts who if he knows anything knows how little he knows.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
When the man is at home his standing in society is well known and quietly taken but when he is abroad it is problematical and is dependent on the success of his manners.
Ralph Waldo Emerson