19th-century Essayist Quotes

Marcel Proust

André Gide

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Robert Louis Stevenson

Lu Xun

Herman Melville

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The public always prefers to be reassured. There are those whose job this is. There are only too many.

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

The heathen spirit is wingless. It cannot lift itself to heights from which the totality of being is visible, and it therefore loses itself in details.

Formerly, leaders of states practiced realism, but did not honor it… With them morality was violated, but moral notions remained intact. … The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality.

What a strange power the perception of beauty is! It seems to ebb and flow like some secret tide, independent alike of health and disease, of joy or sorrow. There are times in our lives when we seem to go singing on our way, and when the beauty of the world sets itself like a quiet harmony to the song we uplift.

Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.

Age... is a matter of feeling, not of years.

George William Curtis

"Love mocks us all"—as Horace said of old:
From sheer perversity, that arch-offender
Still yokes unequally the hot and cold,
The short and tall, the hardened and the tender;
He bids a Socrates espouse a scold,
And makes a Hercules forget his gender:—
Sic visum Veneri! Lest samples fail,
I add a fresh one from the page of BAYLE.

Henry Austin Dobson

If a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

[But if things continue the way they are]... the society that I envision, if my dream is not just a false notion, this society will have to begin to create itself in the midst of fuss, noisiness and panic, and will have to face the prospects of both internal and external war...

There is generally no such thing as duty to the people who do it. They simply take life as it comes, meeting, not, shirking its demands, whether pleasant or unpleasant; and that is pretty much all there is of it.

Mary Abigail Dodge

What is a horse but a species of four-footed dumb man, in a leathern overall, who happens to live upon oats, and toils for his masters, half-requited or abused, like the biped hewers of wood and drawers of water?

Herman Melville

The transmutation of savage fear into scientific curiosity is of the essence of civilisation.

Frederic William Henry Myers

A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment - and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.

The life of the honest man must be an apostasy and a perpetual desertion. The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors. And the man who wishes to remain faithful to justice must make himself continually unfaithful to inexhaustibly triumphant injustices.

The spot of ground on which a man has stood is forever interesting to him.

Alexander Smith

Science has but one fashion - to lose nothing once gained...

Edmund Clarence Stedman

As long as man labors for a physical existence, though an act of necessity almost, he is yet natural; it is life, though that of this world, for which he instinctively works.

You mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese-toasted, mostly-and woke up again, and here I were.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Singing is near miraculous because it is the mastering of what is otherwise a pure instrument of egotism: the human voice.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.

In the moon's eclipse,
The earth's round shadow on its face I see!
I read God's works, which are his book indeed,
And trust the hint that falleth from his lips
More than all man's infallibility.

Minot Judson Savage

A dining room table with children's eager hungry faces around it, ceases to be a mere dining room table, and becomes an altar.

Simeon Strunsky

Too much rigidity on the part of teachers should be followed by a brisk spirit of insubordination on the part of the taught.