Browsing Topic Best Essays Quotes

In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll’s Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit.

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.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make to them; a man may live long, yet get little from life. Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will – Montaigne, Essays

It makes more sense to write one big book – a novel or nonfiction narrative – than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It’s wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

Remember that as a vegan, you save dozens of animals every year from the horrors of factory farms, which is great. And when you convince one person to also become vegan, in that moment you double your lifetime impact as a vegan! That’s power – and we should use it as effectively as possible. Check out the ‘Be a better advocate’ videos and essays at www.FarmSanctuary.org.

If you tell me, it’s an essay. If you show me, it’s a story.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.

[George] Orwell’s essays. It’s got it all. Great writing, a worldview that I find interesting and useful, and most of it timelessly true.

Michael Jackson is an extremely productive ethnographer, a serious reader of phenomenological and existential philosophy, and a remarkable writer at a level that one rarely sees in anthropology. Lifeworlds, unsurprisingly, is no exception. The several essays included here fit into an impressive whole that set out a compelling case for a type of ethnography of which Jackson is one of the masters. The writing is strong and the critical reflections impressive. This book defines an approach to anthropology that is resonant enough to challenge the leading models of our time.

I’d written personal essays before, but never on this scale — never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen).

There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.

Eleanor Roosevelt loved to write. She was a wonderful child writer. I mean, she wrote beautiful essays and stories as a child. And Marie Souvestre really appreciated Eleanor Roosevelt’s talents and encouraged her talents. Also, she spoke perfect French. She grew up speaking French. She’s now at a french-speaking school where, you know, girls are coming from all over the world. Not everybody speaks French.

I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay. I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness. Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.

I’m always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man’s essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.

Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page sunrise over the desert and masses of a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

Life is not a multiple choice test, it’s an open-book essay exam.

I like bringing poetry’s focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938.

I could write another collection of personal essays from what has happened to me in the last year alone. I don’t seek out my material – it finds me. I am magnetic, somehow.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

Life isn’t like coursework, baby. It’s one damn essay crisis after another.

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.

For almost a quarter of a century, Teen Ink has been encouraging young people to write – and then has published those pieces. These heartfelt essays and poems explore the issues faced by teenagers today. I applaud their efforts because they not only help young people deal with their own lives but also encourage the budding authors of the next generation.

If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown ‘girl’ would probably be transformed into a’woman’.

A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill’s essay On Liberty, or Hobbes’s Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high side.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labor equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal super-abundance.

In the short stories – if I can make a very lumpy contrast – in the short stories I feel like the lives of the people have a kind of prior desperation and a prior need and my longing is for the story and their lives to somehow come together, even if not finally or forever, to face something; and it felt like a lot of the time with the essays I was wading into situations where there was an assumption of finality of understanding, and I felt like I could wade into any understood moment and tear it apart and make it fall apart.