Essayist Quotes

We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English wit.... But though it is full of good sense and humanity, it is not transcendent poetry.For picturesque description of persons it is, perhaps, without a parallel in English poetry; yet it is essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius never is.

The happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts, and the happy delivery of it another.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.

The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.

I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

I am struck by the simplicity of light in the atmosphere in the autumn, as if the earth absorbed none, and out of this profusion of dazzling light came the autumnal tints.

You are a man still young, so to say, in your first youth and so put intellect above everything.

I know that you don't believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!

As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.

On or about December 1910, human character changed.

Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see - not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

Architects cannot teach nature anything.

Yes, that's right... love should come before logic ... Only then will man come to understand the meaning of life.

Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured in money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.

Optimist: day-dreamer in his small clothes.

Be not simply good - be good for something.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death; and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks Greek architecture is the perfect flowering of geometry.

My life is not an apology, but a life.

It is commonly observed that a sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery or a large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and with the rapid wealth come rapid claims which they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is quickly dissipated.

There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.

What is most vile and despicable about money is that it even confers talent. And it will do so until the end of the world.

We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.

Duty grows everywhere--like children, like grass.

I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

To acknowledge you were wrong yesterday is simply to let the world know that you are wiser today than you were then.

I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to our progress. Our life is frittered away by detail. I say let your affairs be as two or three, not a hundred or a thousand. And keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

The only danger in Friendship is that it will end.

One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk.

It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

In imitation is a bit suicide.

We have an insanity plea that would have saved Cain.

The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds.

I have spent most of my time worrying about things that have never happened. Worrying is not an action! In fact, it is action that alleviates concern and dissipates worries. Take more actions when you feel that worry is creeping in to steal your time. It need not be a huge action, any action in the direction you want to go will do.

Old age: The estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours into the Great Sea.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.

If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loudly. Do not compound mispronunciation with inaudibility

In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.

I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.

The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes.

Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.

Pointing to another world will never stop vice among us; shedding light over this world can alone help us.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.

There are two kinds of music; German music and bad music.

The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or place.

Priapism is what happens when someone gets strangulated to the point of hypoxia.