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Quotations:
The following List of Authors are on the Recommended Reading List for
English (AP*) Language and Composition Courses:

Directions:  Use this source to find resources for your Term Paper on an Abstract topic.

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In no case should these be used as quotes for a research paper.  However, this site may help finding sources for your selected topic.  If you are writing a term paper on friendship, for instance, you can copy down the authors who have quotes on that subject.  Then you would have to actually read and evaluate their works before you could use them as a legitimate source.
 

Edward Abbey (Science and Nature Writer)
Growth  "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

Joseph Addison (Essayist)
Admiration  "Admiration is a very short-lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object, unless it be still fed with fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a new perpetual succession of miracles rising up to its view."
Authority  "No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority."
Books and Reading  "Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors."
Censure  "It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution."
Consequences  "There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected."
Death and Dying  "See in what peace a Christian can die."
Fathers  "That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?"
Friends and Friendship  "The friendships of the world are oft confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasures."
Happiness  "True happiness arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
Honor  "The post of honor is a private station."
Injury  "Young men soon give, and soon forget, affronts; old age is slow in both."
Knowledge  "Knowledge is that which, next to virtue, truly raises one person above another."
Marriage  "A woman seldom asks advice before she has bought her wedding clothes."
Music  "Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below."
Ostentation  "An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person."
Perfection  "It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others."
Pride  "Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall."
Solitude  "To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude."
Time and Time Management  "Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought."

Mortimer J. Adler (Critic)
Reading  "Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life."
Quotations  "In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."

Aesop (Fabulist - Writer of Fables)
Appearance  "Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth.
Danger  "Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow."
Enemies  "Enemies promises were made to be broken."
Kindness  "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."
Originality  "Men often applaud an imitation and hiss the real thing."
Respectability  "Fools take to themselves the respect that is given to their office."
Unity  "In union there is strength."

James Agee (Essayist and Fiction Writer)

Nelson Algren (Fiction Writer)
Advice  "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."
Love  "The Impossible Generalized Man today is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthyóyet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible."

Paula Gunn Allen (Critic)

Roger Angell (Journalist)

Maya Angelou (Autobiographer, Novelist, Poet, etc)
Action  "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
Character  "The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education."
Credulity  "I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water."
God  "I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed."
Life and Living  "Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I'm with you kid. Let's go."
Men and Women  "The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration.  Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulderóin that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghett, wherever.
Smile  "If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning "Good morning" at total strangers."

Gloria Anzaldua (Critic)

Hannah Arendt (Political Writer)
Action  "Action without a name, a "who" attached to it, is meaningless."
Evil   "The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together."
Freedom  "When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness" has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions."
Love  "Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces."
Necessity  "Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity."
Opinions  "Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of
 opinions exists, there may be moodsómoods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the formeróbut no opinion."
Words  " Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses."

Michael Arlen (Critic)

Matthew Arnold
Death and Dying  "Truth sits upon the lips of dying men."
Growth  "The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himselffor going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion."
Memory  "But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will."
Self-love  "Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery."

Francis Bacon (Essayist)
Ability  Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.
Advice  There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man's self.
Age and Aging Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
Atheism  It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.
Bachelor  Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.
Certainty If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
Cheerfulness To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.
Consistency Look to make your course regular, that men may know beforehand what they may expect.
Creation  God's first creature, which was light.
Death and Dying  I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
Discretion Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.
Doubt  Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
Fact  Men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.
Fate  Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.
Forgiveness  This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge keeps his wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.
History and Historians  Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Humankind  Our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us.
Innovation  As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.
Knowledge  Knowledge and human power are synonymous.
Learning  Studies serve for delight, for ornaments, and for ability.
Love  For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
Money  If money be not they servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.
Opportunity  A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
Parents and Parenting  The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.
Poetry and Poets  The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.
Prejudice  All colors will agree in the dark.
Prosperity  Prosperity discovers vice, adversity discovers virtue.
Questions  A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.
Revenge  Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
Silence  Silence is the virtue of fools.
Studying  I would live to study, and not study to live.
Time and Time Management  To choose time is to save time.
Truth  It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth . . . and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.
Wealth  The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.
Youth  Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

James Baldwin (Essayist)
Belief  We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
Change  People can cry much easier than they can change.
Education  It is very nearly impossible . . . to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
Fathers and Sons  If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
Giving  It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.
Money  Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
Pessimism  Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.
Prediction  No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
Teams and Teamwork  The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Writers and Writing  Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Simone De Beauvoir  (Political Writer)
Acceptance  To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
Arts and Artists  In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.
Genius  One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.
Guilt  Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.
Parents and Parenting  It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume th responsibility for everything you doóor don't do.
Sales  Buying is a profound pleasure.
Service  One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

Wendell Berry (Science and Nature Writer)
Excellence  It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.

James Boswell (Autobiographer and Diarist)
Choice  I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose. Besides, practice forms a man to anything.

Jacob Bronowski (Science and Nature Writer)
Action  The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Mind  The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

William F. Buckley (Political Writer)
Democracy  The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

Thomas Carlyle (Biographer and History Writer)
Ability  The king is the man who can.  What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
Action  Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Adversity  Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Anger  In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.
Behavior  It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual.
Belief  No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
Books and Reading  After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Change  The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.
Cheerfulness  Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
Commitment  A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.
Critics and Criticism  No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.
Devil  The devil has his elect.
Doubt  The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.
Enthusiasm  The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because of the fear of making a mistake, won't in the end affirm or deny anything.
Eyes  Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
Faith  To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.
Faults  The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Goals  A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.
Greatness  No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Health  Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!
History and Historians  The whole past is the procession of the present.
Honesty  Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
Ideals and Idealism  The actual well seen is ideal.
Impossibility  It is not a lucky word, this name "impossible"; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths.
Invention and Inventor  The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
Labor  Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.
Leaders and Leadership  Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.
Life and Living  The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
Love  Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.
Money  Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.
Music  Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
Opinions  Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
Perseverance  Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.
Present  We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves;  whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavors in it, may also become clearer.
Purpose  The purpose of man is in action not thought.
Reason  A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.
Responsibility  All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.
Sentiment  The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
Silence  When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
Sincerity  The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
Soul  The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love.
Spirit and Spirituality  The spiritual is the parent of the practical.
Thoughts and Thinking  Thought is the parent of the deed.
Understanding  No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.
Universe  I don't pretend to understand the Universeóit's a great deal bigger than I am.
Victory  No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.
Vocation  It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
Wonder  Wonder is the basis of worship.
Work  Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments, Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.

Rachel Carson (Science and Nature Writer)
Choice  We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the roadóthe one less traveled byóoffers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

Gilbert K. Chesterton (Essayist and Fiction Writer)
Adversity  Do not free the camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
Arts and Artists  The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
Atheism  Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.
Books and Reading  The mere brute pleasure of readingóthe sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
Chastity  Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
Contentment  Being "contented" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.
Courage  Courage is getting away from death by continually coming within an inch of it.
Experience  Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.
Fights and Fighting  You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it.
Greatness  There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
Heart  Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
Hygiene  Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of itóor, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.
Intelligence and Intellectuals  A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.
Love  Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
Men  Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
Normality  Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
People  But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet. Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.
Problems  It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
Retirement  The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.
Ritual  Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
Stupidity  To be clever enough to get all the money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
Truth  You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
Virtue  Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
Wealth  If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.
Youth  No man knows he is young while he is young.

Kenneth Clark (Critic)

Jean de Crevecoeur (Political Writer)

Arlene Croce (Critic)

Winston Churchill  (History Writer)
Achievement  My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.
Advice  In those days he was wiser than he is nowóhe used frequently to take my advice.
Arts and Artists  Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
Capitalism  The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Children  There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.
Conscience  There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right.
Courage  Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
Critics and Criticism  When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.
Decisions  They are decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.
Expression  I have never accepted what many people have kindly said-namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it.
Genius  True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.
Heroes and Heroism  Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
Humankind  If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another
Justice  The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
Learning  Personally, I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
Mind  The empires of the futures are the empires of the mind.
Nations  The maxim of the British people is "Business as usual."
Opportunity  The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Perseverance  Never, never, never, never give up.
Planning  I'm just preparing my impromptu remarks.
Quotations  It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read a book of quotations.
Simplicity  Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.
Speakers and Speaking  If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use the pile driver. Hit the point once. The come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time; a tremendous whack.
Time and Time Managemen  If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find we have lost the future.
Victory  Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.
Words  I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.
Writers and Writing  Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Judith Ortiz Cofer (Autobiographer and Diarist)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Critic)
Critics and Criticism  Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
Language  Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
Plagiarism  Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.
Wit  Humor is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.
 

Charles Dana (Science and Nature Writer)

Charles Darwin (Autobiographer and Diarist)
Change  It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Mistakes  I love fools experiments. I am always making them.

Vine DeLoria (Biographer and History Writer)

Frederick Douglass (Autobiographer and Diarist)
Gentlemen  A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.
Right and Rightness  Man's greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.

Maureen Dowd (Journalist)
Acceptance  "The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for."

Annie Dillard (Science and Nature Writer)
Beauty  "No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? "

Elizabeth Drew (Journalist)
Frustration  The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and "mangled mind" leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
Poetry and Poets  We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death;  have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

W. E. B. DuBois (Political Writer)
Modesty  "If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they have not often let their presence be known."

Leon Edel (Biographer and History Writer)

Gretel Ehrlich (Science and Nature Writer)

Loren Eiseley (Science and Nature Writer)
Possibilities  "The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know."

Richard Ellmann (Biographer and History Writer)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Critic and Essayist)
Ability  Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones . . . .
People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
Achievement  Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Action
A man's action is only a picture book of his creed . . . .
Men's actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action . . . .
There is a tendency for things to right themselves.
Adversity  A man is a god in ruins.
Age and Aging  We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.
Ambition  Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
Amusement  The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.
Anger  We boil at different degrees.
Appearance  'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
Arts and Artists  Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance . . . .
Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art . . . .
Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry . . . .
Attitude  To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
Beauty  As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker . . . .
We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes . . .
Belief  Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.
Books and Reading  Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature . . . .
There is creative reading as well as creative writing . . . .
Bragging  There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.
Character  Do what you know and perception is converted into character . . . .
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character . . . .
Charity  Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.
Choice  We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
Commitment  All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.
Compensation  For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
Conflict  We are the prisoners of ideas.
Contradiction  Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Conversation  Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.
Courage  A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before . . . .
When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.
Courtesy  Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.
Creeds  As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
Critics and Criticism  Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.
Danger  As soon as there is life there is danger.
Decisions  Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
Destiny  Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; for causes which are unpenetrated.
Difficulties  There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.
Discipline  Self-command is the main discipline.
Dress  I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.
Education  I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son . . . .
The secret in education lies in respecting the student . . . .
Energy  Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.
Enthusiasm  Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.
Exaggeration  There is no one who does not exaggerate!
Exercise  Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.
Extra Mile  I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
Facts  Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.
Faith  Our faith comes in moments... yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.
Fame  Fame is proof that the people are gullible.
Fate  Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
Fear  Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Freedom  For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?
Friends and Friendship  A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature . . . .
Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path . . . .
I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them . . . .
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
Genius  Accept your genius and say what you think . . . .
The greatest genius is the most indebted person . . . .
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all menóthat is genius.
Goals  We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
Good and Evil  Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.
Greatness  No great man ever complains of want of opportunity . . . .
Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind . . . .
The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
Happiness  To fill the houróthat is happiness.
Heart  Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
Heroes and Heroism  Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Honesty  Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.
Hypocrisy  At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
Ideas  Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.
Imagination We live by our imagination, our admiration s, and our sentiments.
Imitation  Imitation is suicide.
Individuality A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.
Inheritance Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.
Integrity  Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Intelligence and Intellectuals  One definition of man is "an intelligence served by organs."
Intuition  If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Knowledge  I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.
Language  Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
Leaders and Leadership  We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.
Learning  No man ever prayed heartily without learning something . . . .
The years teach us much the days never knew.
Lies and Lying  Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
Life and Living  Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give . . . .
Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.
Literature  People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.
Love  All mankind loves a lover.
Manners  Manners are the happy way of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of loveónow repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dewdrops which give such depth to the morning meadows.
Martyrdom  The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.
Men  Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.
Mentors  We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.
Money  It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.
Motivation  If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
Nature  Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of hidden stuff . . . .
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations . . . .
Nature... She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.
Necessity  Necessity does everything well.
Obstacles  As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.
Opportunity  Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwritingóa wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.
Parents and Parenting  Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?
Peace  Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.
Performance  It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.
Philanthropists  The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.
Planning  Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Poetry and Poets  It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.
Possibilities  Oh man! There is no planet sun or star could hold you, if you but knew what you are.
Power  Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other . . . .
The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.
Praise  When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.
Present  Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
Property  Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.
Purpose  Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.
Quotations  I hate quotations. Tell me what you know . . . .
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
Reform Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.
Riches  Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.
Self-esteem  Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves.
Self-improvement  The never-ending task of self improvement.
Self-reliance  No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.
Self-trust  Self-trust is the first secret to success.
Silence  Let us be silent that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
Sincerity  Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
Society  Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Solitude  Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius.
Sorrow  The only thing grief as taught me is to know how shallow it is.
Soul  The soul's emphasis is always right.
Spirit and Spirituality  The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.
Strength  We acquire the strength we have overcome.
Success  To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Talent  Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call . . . .
Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character . . . .
Teachers and Teaching  The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.
Thoughts and Thinking  A man's what he thinks about all day long . . . .
The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own . . . .
Thought makes every thing fit for use . . . .
What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul's emphasis is always right . . . .
Time and Time Management
The surest poison is time.
Travel and Tourism  No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great babyóso helpless and so ridiculous.
Trust  Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great . . . .
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Truth  Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
Ugliness  The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
Valor  There is always safety in valor.
Victory  Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.
Virtue  The virtue in most request is conformity . . . .
The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
Voice  A man's style is his mind's voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.
Wealth  Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.
Wisdom  Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it . . . .
Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.
Wives  A man's wife has more power over him than the state has.
Words  It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.
Work  Work is victory.

Nora Ephron (Journalist)

M. F. K. Fisher (Journalist)

Frances Fitzgerald (Journalist)

Janet Flanner (Genet) (Journalist)

Shelly Foote (Biographer and History Writer)

Benjamin Franklin (Autobiographer and Diarist)
Absence  The absent are never without fault. Nor the present without excuse.
Advice  They that will not be counseled, cannot be helped. If you do not hear reason she will rap you on the knuckles.
Age and Aging  Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
Alliances  I think that a young state, like a young virgin, should modestly stay at home, and wait the application of suitors for an alliance with her; and not run about offering her amity to all the world; and hazarding their refusal. Our virgin is a jolly one; and tho at present not very rich, will in time be a great fortune, and where she has a favorable predisposition, it seems to me well worth cultivating.
Anger  Whatever is begun in anger, ends in shame.
Books and Reading  Read much, but not many books.
Business  If you can't pay for a thing, don't buy it. If you can't get paid for it, don't sell it. Do this, and you will have calm and drowsy nights, with all of the good business you have now and none of the bad. If you have time, don't wait for time.
Change  When you're finished changing, you're finished.
Conflict  If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.
Contentment  Content makes poor men rich; discontentment makes rich men poor.
Cooperation  We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
Critics and Criticism  If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.
Deception  Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don't have brains enough to be honest.
Diligence  Diligence is the mother of good luck.
Discovery  What has become clear to you since we last met?
Enemies  I have met the enemy, and it is the eyes of other people.
Example  Well done, is better than well said.
Expenditure  Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.
Faith  The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.
Family  He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.
Fortune  He that waits upon fortune, is never sure of a dinner.
Genius  Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What's a sundial in the shade.
Gratitude  Most people return small favors, acknowledge medium ones and repay greater onesówith ingratitude.
Habit  Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.
Happiness  There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our meansóeither may doóthe result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.
Heart  The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.
Idleness  Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease.
Ignorance  Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn.
Insults  Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble.
Knowledge  God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my country!
Learning  The things which hurt, instruct.
Leisure  Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.
Lies and Lying  Lying rides upon debt's back.
Love  He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.
Marriage  An undutiful daughter will prove an unmanageable wife.
Men and Women  When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue.
Money  The use of money is all the advantage there is in having money.
Necessity  Necessity never made a good bargain.
Opportunity  Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
Peace  There never was a good war or a bad peace.
Physicians  He's the best physician that knows the worthlessness of the most medicines.
Pleasure  Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.
Prayer  Work as if you were to live a hundred years. Pray as if you were to die tomorrow.
Pride  Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and governments.
Procrastination  Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.
Reputation  Glass, china, and reputation are easily cracked, and never mended well.
Riches  He who multiplies riches, multiplies cares.
Safety  He that's secure is not safe.
Self-love  He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals.
Slander  I am about courting a girl I have had but little acquaintance with. How shall I come to a knowledge of her faults, and whether she has the virtues I imagine she has? Answer. Commend her among her female acquaintances.
Stupidity  We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.
Tact and Tactfulness  A spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar.
Things and Little Things  Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.
Time and Time Management  If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.
Vanity  Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter, wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others who are within his sphere of action: and therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life.
Want  Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.
Wealth  He does not posses wealth that allows it to possess him.
Wisdom  The doors of wisdom are never shut.
Wives  Never take a wife till thou hast a house (and a fire) to put her in.

John Hope Franklin (Biographer and History Writer)

Antonia Fraser (Biographer and History Writer)

Margaret Fuller (Political Writer)
Books and Reading A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
Genius  It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.
Popularity  Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.

Paul Fussell (Essayist and Fiction Writer)

John Kenneth Galbraith (Political Writer)
Age and Aging  An important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.
Diplomacy  There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
Money  Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
Tycoons  There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
Wealth  Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

Mavis Gallant (Essayist and Fiction Writer)

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Critic)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Political Writer)
Facts  A concept is stronger than a fact.

Stephen Jay Gould (Science and Nature Writer)

Ellen Goodman (Journalist)
Tradition  Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe and aren't even aware of.

Nadine Gordimer (Essayist and Fiction Writer)
 Arts and Artists  Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
Heaven  If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
Responsibility  Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

Edward Gibbon (Biographer and History Writer)

David Halberstam (Journalist)

William Hazlitt (Critic)
Acting and Actors  We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.
Action  The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
Appearance  First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not infrequently) to our cost, when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or studied actions. A man's look is the work of years; it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily.
Candor  There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body.
Cooperation  We are all of us, more or less, the slaves of opinion.
Custom  Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
Deception  Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering the weaknesses of others.
Dress  Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.
Excellence  One shining quality lends a luster to another, or hides some glaring defect.
Fame  There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
Faults  It is well that there is no one without a fault; for he would not have a friend in the world.
Friends and Friendship  I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about . . . .
There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our friends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we pleaseóthat is, as they please or displease us . . . .
Grace  Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
Happiness  Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.
Hypocrisy  The only vice which cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.
Injury  An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.
Laughter  Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might of been.
Liberty  The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
Memory  To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
Morality  Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
Peace  If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.
Poetry and Poets  The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.
Power  If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.
Prejudice No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
Reason  To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.
Superstition  Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols -- it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
Temper  Good temper is one of the greatest preservers of the features.
Understanding  The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.
Vocation  People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.
Writers and Writing  The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

Lillian Hellman (Autobiographer and Diarist)

Edward Hoaglund (Essayist and Fiction Writer)

Thomas Hobbes (Political Writer)
Conscience  A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.
Mistakes  No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.
Understanding  Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.
Words  Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools.

Richard Holmes (Biographer and History Writer)

Zora Neale Hurston (Essayist and Fiction Writer)
Fear  Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

Thomas Jefferson (Political Writer)
Age and Aging  My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.
Books and Reading  Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
Censure  I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.
Control  Nothing gives a person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
Family  The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.
Friends and Friendship  But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.
Guilt  It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Health  The sovereign invigorator of the body is exercise, and of all the exercises walking is the best.
Injustice  I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.
Liberty  The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
Life and Living  Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.
Martyrdom  What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
Occupation  It is neither wealth nor splendor; but tranquillity and occupation which give happiness.
Peace  Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.
Pride  Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold.
Questions  Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
Resignation  Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Soldier  Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
Thoughts and Thinking  The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.
Truth  The man who fears no truth has nothing to fear from lies.
Tyranny  Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.

Samuel Johnson (Critic)
Adversity  Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.
Age and Aging  When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.
Approval  The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.
Bachelor  They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.
Books and Reading  Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.
Calamity  Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience. You will find it a calamity.
Change  Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.
Complaints and Complaining  Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.
Concentration  Those who attain to any excellence commonly spend life in some single pursuit, for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.
Contrast  The luster of diamonds is invigorated by the interposition of darker bodies; the lights of a picture are created by the shades; the highest pleasure which nature has indulged to sensitive perception is that of rest after fatigue.
Courage  He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.
Creation  There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?
Curiosity  Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.
Death and Dying  It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.
Desire  Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.
Disease  Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.
Effort  What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.
Example  They teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master.
Fame  He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds; but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel.
Fear  Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.
Friends and Friendship  I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance . . . .
To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.
Generations  Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child's rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man's whore.
Greatness  The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.
Happiness  To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.
Heroes and Heroism  Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.
Hope  Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment.
Humor  I am a great friend to public amusements, for they keep the people from vice.
Idleness  As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.
Indifference  I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
Involvement  It is easy to talk of sitting at home contented, when others are seeing or making shows. But not to have been where it is supposed, and seldom supposed falsely, that all would go if they could; to be able to say nothing when everyone is talking; to have no opinion when everyone is judging; to hear exclamations of rapture without power to depress; to listen to falsehoods without right to contradict, is, after all, a state of temporary inferiority, in which the mind is rather hardened by stubbornness, than supported by fortitude. If the world be worth winning let us enjoy it, if it is to be despised let us despise it by conviction. But the world is not to be despised but as it is compared with something better.
Kindness  To cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.
Knowledge  Knowledge is of two kinds: We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information about it.
Labor  Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.
Language  I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.
Laziness  Turn on the prudent ant thy heedful eyes. Observe her labors, sluggard, and be wise.
Letters  In a man's letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.
Marriage  Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures . . . .
There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.
Memory  The true art of memory is the art of attention.
Misers and Misery  Do not discourage your children from hoarding, if they have a taste to it; whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite; and shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future to the present moment.
Money  Whatever you have spend less.
Pain  He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
Patriotism  Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Perspective  Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.
Piety  A wicked fellow is the most pious when he takes to it. He'll beat you all at piety.
Pleasure  No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.
Portraits I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.
Poverty and The Poor  It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.
Praise  The real satisfaction which praise can afford, is when what is repeated aloud agrees with the whispers of conscience, by showing us that we have not endeavored to deserve well in vain.
Pride  Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.
Quotations   He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.
Reputation  The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out, but it often dies in the socket; a very few names may be considered as perpetual lamps that shine unconsumed.
Retirement  Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.
Rhetoric  Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.
Secrets  To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.
Self-love  Self-love is often rather arrogant than blind; it does not hide our faults from ourselves, but persuades us that they escape the notice of others.
Skepticism  Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
Sorrow  Sorrow is the rust of the soul and activity will cleanse and brighten it.
Statistics  Round numbers are always false.
Suspicion  He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.
Things and Little Things  There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
Travel and Tourism  He that travels in theory has no inconveniences; he has shade and sunshine at his disposal, and wherever he alights finds tables of plenty and looks of gaiety. These ideas are indulged till the day of departure arrives, the chaise is called, and the progress of happiness begins. A few miles teach him the fallacies of imagination. The road is dusty, the air is sultry, the horses are sluggish. He longs for the time of dinner that he may eat and rest. The inn is crowded, his orders are neglected, and nothing remains but that he devour in haste what the cook has spoiled, and drive on in quest of better entertainment. He finds at night a more commodious house, but the best is always worse than he expected.
Tyranny  No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government.
Value  The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.
Virtue  Wickedness is always easier than virtue, for it takes a short cut to everything.
Wit  He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
Work  It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.
Writers and Writing  The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Youth  Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.

Pauline Kael (Critic)

Evelyn Fox Keller (Science and Nature Writer)

Helen Keller (Autobiographer and Diarist)
Effort  When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.
Kings  There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
Perseverance  We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough.
Risk  Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Senses  Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived.
Teams and Teamwork  Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.
Tolerance  The highest result of education is tolerance.
Youth  It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it  will advance it allotted length.

George Kennan (Political Writer)

Jamaica Kincaid (Essayist and Fiction Writer)

Martin Luther King, Jr. (Political Writer)
Acceptance  We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.
Character  I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Courage  We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.
Dreams  Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:ówe hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
Excellence  If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.
Freedom  The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.
Hope  We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
Joy  Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.
Mind  We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.
Peace  Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
Revenge  That old law about "an eye for an eye" leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.
Right and Rightness  When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.
Thoughts and Thinking  Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
Virtue  The time is always right to do what is right.

Maxine Hong Kingston (Autobiographer and Diarist)

Charles Lamb (Essayist and Fiction Writer)
Appearance  The beggar is the only person in the universe not obliged to study appearance.
Books and Reading  Borrowers of booksóthose mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
Children  When I consider how little of a rarity children areóthat every street and blind alley swarms with themóthat the poorest people commonly have them in most abundanceóthat there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargainsóhow often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc.óI cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them.
Deeds and Good Deeds The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
Friends and Friendship  Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see another mountain in my life.
Illness  To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives.
Reputation  For God's sake (I never was more serious) don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print . . . substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question.
Teachers and Teaching  Why are we never quite at ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? Because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours.

Lewis Lapham (Political Writer)
Enthusiasm  The figure of the enthusiast who has just discovered jogging or a new way to fix tofu can be said to stand or, more accurately, to tremble on the threshold of conversion, as the representative American.
Riches  A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn't enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong. The spectacle is nearly always comic.

T. E. Lawrence (Autobiographer and Diarist)
Adversity  There could be no honor in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat.

John Locke (Political Writer)
Action  The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
Contentment  A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this World: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be little the better for anything else.
Humankind  Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided.
Logic  Logic is the anatomy of thought.
Opinions  New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
Self-esteem  Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.
Understanding  The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.

Andy Logan (Journalist)

Barry Lopez (Science and Nature Writer)

Thomas Macaulay (Biographer and History Writer)
Character  The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
Knowledge  Charles V. said that a man who knew four languages was worth four men; and Alexander the Great so valued learning, that he used to say he was more indebted to Aristotle for giving him knowledge that, than his father Philip for giving him life.
Persecution  To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.
Popularity  A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf . . . .  For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties.

Niccolo Machiavelli (Political Writer)
Ambition  Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.
Favors  Benefits should be conferred gradually; and in that way they will taste better.
Humankind  Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.
Intelligence and Intellectuals  There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.
Leaders and Leadership  There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
Promises  A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.

Norman Mailer (Essayist and Fiction Writer)
Democracy  A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
Honor  Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
Modern and Modernism  The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.

Nancy Mairs (Essayist and Fiction Writer)

Peter Mathiessen (Science and Nature Writer)

Mary McCarthy (Essayist and Fiction Writer)
Culture  A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.
Liberty  Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.
Life and Living  We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
Materialism  The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a negative point of view, intolerable. What the foreigner finds most objectionable in American life is its lack of basic comfort. No nation with any sense of material well-being would endure the food we eat, the cramped apartments we live in, the noise, the traffic, the crowded subways and buses. American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.
Work  Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a "work" of man.

John McPhee (Journalist)

Margaret Mead (Science and Nature Writer)
Age and Aging  If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
Children  Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.
Family  Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.
Retirement  Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.

H. L. Mencken (Journalist)
Agreement  On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women.
Bachelor  Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.
Books and Reading  There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
Choice  Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.
Cynics and Cynicism  A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
Democracy  The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
God  God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.
Heroes and Heroism  In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
Humankind  Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
Hygiene  Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.
Incredulity  The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
Laughter  One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
Leisure  The idea that leisure is of value in itself is only conditionally true. The average man simply spends his leisure as a dog spends it. His recreations are all puerile, and the time supposed to benefit him really only stupefies him.
Life and Living  Life is a dead-end street.
Love  To be in love is merely to be in a perpetual state of anesthesia.
Men and Women  M