Essayist Quotes

Marcel Proust

André Gide

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jonathan Swift

Robert Louis Stevenson

Lu Xun

Herman Melville

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

It is amazing how nice people are to you when they know you are going away.

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

Quaking muscles in the act of birth,
Between her legs a pigmy face appear,
And the first murderer lay upon the earth.

It often happens that the quotations constitute the most valuable part of a book.

If somebody's trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.

Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

Randall Jarrell

I have everything I need. A square of sky, a piece of stone, a page, a pen, and memory raining down on me in sleeves.

And we are beginning to hear the groaning from our tortured planet. We are at a point when we must realize that if we want to continue to call this planet our home, we need to change - not the planet, but ourselves.

When you ask God to send you trials, you may be sure your prayer will be granted.

To marry for love were no reproachful thing if we did not see that of ten thousand couples that do it, hardly one can be brought for an example that it may be done and not repented afterwards...

Dorothy Osborne

We must not be timid from a fear of committing faults: the greatest fault of all is to deprive oneself of experience.

Luc de Clapiers

Much of traditional magic takes place by the light of the Moon. In the night world we are closer to the unconscious, the hidden, that which has yet to be made manifest, that which is suppressed and as yet realized. Past, present, and future are simultaneously one in the realm of the unconscious. Night is when this world and the other world can meet.

Vivianne Crowley

Any and all religions are real, the genuine article, to their practitioners. There can never be one religion, prophet, or savior that will satisfy all six billion humans. Each of us must find our ideal way to attune with deity.

Scott Cunningham

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

So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.

William S. Burroughs

Science is an ideal of the method of nature, and the production of that ideal is a true creation.

Samuel Morison Brown

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

John Perry Barlow

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.

Nor elves, nor fays, nor magic charm, Have pow'r, or will, to work us harm; For those who dare the truth to tell, Fays, elves, and fairies, wish them well.

Maria Edgeworth

DeMaistre and Bonald … wanted to teach men submission, to give them the religion of established power, to substitute, in Bonald's phrase, the evidence of authority for the authority of evidence.

Alain Finkielkraut

The more we study mind and matter scientifically the more we see that all things follow a natural sequence, a sequence as liable to work for our disadvantage as for our advantage. It flows like the water of a river, it falls like rain, it is as impartial as the sea. It is as innocent of malice as it is of compassion.

I don't think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was.

Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?

Charles D'Ambrosio