Browsing Topic Best Essayists Quotes

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.

What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.

Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone’s sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice.

Not everyone is capable of madness; and of those lucky enough to be capable, not many have the courage for it.

One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth.

Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. it does involve the belief that god loves man and for his sake became man and died.

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.

I’ll never know, and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.

The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.

You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history of economics or science or the arts.

Christopher Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language.

You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

Essayists must not only be succinct but have original ideas and, even harder to come by, or to fake, likable voices. Consciously or not, they endeavor to win us over by charm. If an essayist can not only charm but write the unforgettable sentence, one that reveals the heart in a few words, I’m her slave.

I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.

All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.

Any essayist setting out on a frail apparatus of notings and jottings is a brave person.

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.