Written Quotes - Page 25

• Our passions are the chief means of self-preservation; to try to destroy them is therefore as absurd as it is useless; this would be to overcome nature, to reshape God's handiwork. If God bade man annihilate the passions he has given him, God would bid him be and not be; He would contradict himself. He has never given such a foolish commandment, there is nothing like it written on the heart of man, and what God will have a man do, He does not leave to the words of another man. He speaks Himself; His words are written in the secret heart.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Mean, Passion, Heart

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2009). “Emile: Or, On Education”, p.384, The Floating Press

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• Equity is that idea of justice which contravenes the written law.

  Aristotle

  Law, Ideas, Justice

  Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes (1833). “Aristotle's Treatise on Rhetoric”, p.91

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• A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.

  Toni Morrison

  Ideas, Silence, Desire

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

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• Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Writing

  "52: Episode 29" by by Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, AM Homes,, www.theguardian.com. December 12, 2008.

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• No action, whether foul or fair, Is ever done, but it leaves somewhere A record, written by fingers ghostly, As a blessing or a curse, and mostly In the greater weakness or greater strength Of the acts which follow it.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Blessing, Weakness, Done

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867). “The Poetical Works of H. W. Longfellow. Complete Edition”, p.160

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• This was 1990, the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.

  Bill Bryson

  Fall, Sadness, Self

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• An illustrator in my own mind - and this is not a truth of any kind - is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that's what you hold on to, and that's what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there.

  Maurice Sendak

  Falling In Love, Believe, Book

  "Sendak on Sendak". Interview at Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, 2007/2008.

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• I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

  May Sarton

  Writing, Universal

  Quoted in Encore: A Journal of the 80thYear (1993).

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• Passing away" is written on the world and all the world contains.

  Felicia Hemans

  Death, Passing Away, World

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations". Book by J.K. Hoyt & K.L. Roberts, 1922.

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• O Death, the Consecrator! Nothing so sanctifies a name As to be written--Dead. Nothing so wins a life from blame, So covers it from wrath and shame, As doth the burial-bed.

  Herman Melville

  Death, Winning, Names

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• I like my films to have a certain amount of realism - something that's thought provoking and intelligently written. More than the amount on the pay cheque, I look for a level of respectability as an actor.

  Arjun Rampal

  Thought Provoking, Looks, Actors

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• If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Kings, Regret, Broken

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, p.250, 1982.

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• In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Writing, Men, History

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1873). “The Pearl of Orr's Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine”, p.165

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• I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.

  William Styron

  Book, Writing, Past

  William Styron (1993). “This Quiet Dust and Other Writings”, Vintage

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• We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law?s treatment.

  David Mamet

  Ignorance, Law, Perfect

  David Mamet (2011). “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture”, p.74, Penguin

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• It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Light, Ideas, Done

  Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Dispossessed”, p.35, Hachette UK

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• When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.

  George Saintsbury

  Writing, People, Literature

  George Saintsbury (1950). “A Last Vintage: Essays and Papers”

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• We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.

  George Saintsbury

  Writing, Men, Thinking

  "A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day" by George Saintsbury, the first US edition; New York: Dodd, Meads, (Vol. 1, pp. 4-5), (1900-04).

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• Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world.

  George Saintsbury

  Criticism, World, Endeavour

  George Saintsbury, Foreword By Mohit K. Ray (2004). “History Of English Criticism”, p.535, Atlantic Publishers & Dist

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• Well, my father Kingsley Amis was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it was good that I began when I was young and bold and foolish, otherwise I'd have become too self-conscious and aware of the weight of not having written anything yet.

  Martin Amis

  Father, Writing, Thinking

  "Martin Amis: I wasn’t trying to impress my father". Interview with Jane Graham, www.salon.com. July 24, 2013.

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• So we have a choice to make. We can once again let Washington's bad habits stand in the way of progress. Or we can pull together and say that in America, our destiny isn't written for us but by us. We can place good ideas ahead of old ideological battles, and a sense of purpose above the same narrow partisanship. We can act boldly to turn crisis into opportunity and, together, write the next great chapter in our history and meet the test of our time.

  Barack Obama

  Writing, Destiny, Opportunity

  "The Action Americans Need". www.washingtonpost.com. February 5, 2009.

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• Fate's sentence written on the brow no hand can e'er efface.

  Bhartrhari

  Fate, Hands, Brows

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• Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.

  Alan Bennett

  Wall, Nice, Writing

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Writing Home”, p.193, Faber & Faber

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• It is no small comfort that God hath written some Scriptures to you which He hath not to others. Read these, and think God is like a friend who sendeth a letter to a whole house and family, but who speaketh in His letter to some by name that are dearest to Him in the house.

  Samuel Rutherford

  Thinking, Names, House

  Samuel Rutherford (1863). “Letters of Samuel Rutherford: With a Sketch of His Life”, p.68

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• It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur" - although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony - or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do - though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story!

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Thinking, Ideas, Doe

  Letter to August Derleth (16 May 1931), in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, (p. 505), 1996.

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