Essayist Quotes

We hail Science as man's truest friend and noblest helper.

There are almost no beautiful cities in America, though there are many beautiful parts of cities, and some sections that are glorious without being beautiful, like downtown Chicago. Cities are too big and too rich for beauty; they have outgrown themselves too many times.

The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.

Alice McDermott

Go your way, seducers, flatterers, idlers, those glib of tongue and charlatans; I am not a seed that you can force to grow; my goal differs so from yours that I would be wasting my time in trying to explain where my inclination drives me.

Dominique Fernandez

Thirty, thirty-five, forty, all had come to visit her like admonitory relatives, and all had slipped away without a trace, without a sound, and now, once again, she was waiting.

Evan S. Connell

You know what they say - sleep is the mother's drug of choice, but like heroin, only the very rich and the very poor can afford it.

Elissa Schappell

The world is full of tragedy; and sympathy, a little common sympathy, can do so much to soften the worst of grief. It is for the lack of that, that people despair and go down.

Philosophical systems? Even the most impressive of them are uncomfortably seated on a throne of rock bottom stupidity, that self-inflicted narrow-mindness which renders a mind capable of believing that it, a part of the immense world, could absolute

In his final remarks to the White House staff, on the day he resigned his office, Nixon applied a version of the lesson to himself. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.

'You might think of combinatorics as a machine too', the major says. 'A different sort of machine, though. Have you heard of Babbage's analytic engine? He never built it.... I have an analytic machine of my own-right here.' He taps his own skull.

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

Charles D'Ambrosio

As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

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

I've always liked edges, places where one thing becomes another…… transition zones, boundaries and borderlands. I like the mixing that happens, the juxtapositions, the collisions and connections. I like the way they help me see the world from a fresh angle.

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

The transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist feeds off woman's true energy source, i.e. her woman-identified self. It is he who recognises that if female spirit, mind, creativity and sexuality exist anywhere in a powerful way it is here, among lesbian-feminists.

Modern man threw a brick through his own window in order to sell himself a burglar alarm.

Magic is what happens when you have encountered the Divine. It is the life-altering experiences of connecting to the divinity that dwells within yourself and in the world.

To me physical beauty is not the issue, vibrational beauty is and the most beautiful people I meet are those who are radiating the love and wisdom of the Divine force that breathes them.

I have seen white settlers in Africa who had sworn that they would never sit down to table with those "smelly blacks" sit down quite happily with half-nude tribesmen once a country achieves independence. It is the context of power which changes behavior and transmutes antipathy into sympathy.

The new anticapitalist are, in spirit and motive, deontologists, and thus criticized not so much the consequences of capitalism (though this teleological elements is present), but motives, e.g., the profit motive, acquisitiveness, 'materialism' and the like.

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 discovered that nothing really matters except not being old and being alive and having potential to dream about, and not being alone.

James Alan McPherson

A hydrogen-rich environment exposed to energy in the presence of carbon — conditions that certainly existed throughout our solar system, if not the universe — will, by the rules of chemistry, produce the building blocks of life.

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

Samuel Morison Brown