Quotes of: Essays Keyword

It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile.

Arguably: Selected Essays

In my opinion and to the best of my understanding, free-will and pre-determination are two distinctly different economies that are 'operationally co-existent'".

Apologia: A Collection of Christian Essays

When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." [ ]

Abolishing Christianity and Other Essays

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

Arguably: Selected Essays

Critical thinking is a lost 'art' that has yet to be found, if it is even being looked for".

Apologia: A Collection of Christian Essays

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays

The objection to propaganda is not only its appeal to unreason, but still more the unfair advantage which it gives to the rich and powerful.

Sceptical Essays

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men--that is genius.

Self-Reliance and Other Essays

Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.

Myself with Others: Selected Essays

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

Montaigne: Essays

Fear is isolating for those that fear. And I have come to believe that fear is a cruelty to those who are feared.

Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays

One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.

At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

Less Than One: Selected Essays

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.

The Library at Night

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

Poems and Essays

Logic is the mirror of thought, and not vice versa;in classes, relations et nombres; essai sur les groupements de logistique et la réversibilitié de lq pensée

The Psychology of Intelligence

Every time we exterminate a predator, we are in a sense creating a new predator.

The Untamed Garden and Other Personal Essays

Land and water are not really separate things, but they are separate words, and we perceive through words.

The Untamed Garden and Other Personal Essays

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.

Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

This is a diseased world in which it is impossible for anyone to be fully human. One way or another, everyone who lives in the modern world is sick or maladjusted.

Revolutionary Nonviolence: Essays