Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.
I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.
Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.
The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
Any teacher can study books, but books do not necessarily bring wisdom, nor that human insight essential to consummate teaching skills.
"Old times" never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better.
'Old times' never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better.
Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.
Each individual has a responsibility to get out of bed, learn their ABCs, learn your math tables, not use race and racism as an excuse.
It's so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn't say, Yours truly, at the end.
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
I am quite sure that no friendship yields its true pleasure and nobility of nature without frequent communication, sympathy and service.
Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.
The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.
Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
If you want to enter hell, don't complain of the dark; you can't blame the world for being unfair if you start on the path of the rebel.
Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.
People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding.
I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.
I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.
If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.
Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.
Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
It is not meant that the artist, in arriving at truth, must follow the way of the scientist, or, in stating it, the way of the philosopher.
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
Those [Christians] had left to love on earth were then: brothers and sisters in hatred, whom they called then: brothers and sisters in love.
All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.
Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.
I hope that I'm not the type of person who, standing at the doorway to hell, strikes a heroic pose and then starts frowning with indecision.
In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
Naturally, our own irrational demands strike us as having the force of needs, while other people's needs strike us as capricious indulgences.
I like that people who are not experts can not only understand but get engaged by my work. I like that Joe Paterno can read me. Bill Bradley.
Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.
I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.
The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.
A nation's poets are its true owners; and by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its real possessions to strangers and aliens.
Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.
These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.