Top 54 Best Essays Quotes
#1. All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge.
Geoff Dyer
#2. The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.
Marilynne Robinson
#3. One of the best essays I've seen in recent years was by a young woman who wrote about how being chosen to choreograph a high school musical forced her to assume a leadership role she wasn't sure she was ready for - but of course she was.
Kate Klise
#4. Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.
Aaron Belz
#5. My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha'am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha'am's essays.
Noam Chomsky
#6. I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
Reid Hoffman
#7. I began writing early - very, very early ... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
Wole Soyinka
#8. In a series of wonderful essays, Evan Handler gives himself up to us - warts and all. To our amusement and bemusement we share in his emotional growth as he struggles to mature. I not only laughed along with him but felt that I too had grown a little along the way. Who could ask for more?
Lewis Black
#9. Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.
Kate Christensen
#10. I'd written personal essays before, but never on this scale
never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen).
Ayelet Waldman
#11. Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable
Per Brinch Hansen
#12. I have not seen anywhere in the world a more obvious malformed person and miracle than myself. Through use and time we become conditioned to anything strange; but the more I become familiar with and know myself, the more my deformity amazes me and the less I understand myself.
Michel De Montaigne
#13. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates.
Al Gore
#14. My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.
Ishmael Reed
#15. In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll's Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit.
Charlie Chaplin
#16. I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.
Joan Collins
#17. You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.
Anthony Bourdain
#18. Fourteen years in the professor dodge has taught me that one can argue ingeniously on behalf of any theory, applied to any piece of literature. This is rarely harmful, because normally no-one reads such essays.
Robert B. Parker
#19. At university level, I had an economics lecturer who used to joke that I was the only student who handed in essays on British Airways notepaper.
Sebastian Coe
#20. In my new book, 'Binge,' I share essays about everything I've never told my viewers - touching on the best and worst days of my life, some hilarious, some embarrassing, but all extremely personal.
Tyler Oakley
#21. For all the power of video and film, I am not giving up my pen. I am just much more likely to try to link essays to webcasts or videos. The best way for these two media to move forward, to inform and make change, is in tandem; together they are more than the sum of their parts.
Naomi Wolf
#22. (Francis) Bacon's best known writings are his essays. They are loved for many reasons, such as their being so short.
Richard Armour
#23. The politics of the Essays preach a conservatism natural in one who aspired to rule. Bacon wants a strong central power. Monarchy is the best form of government; and usually the efficiency of a state varies with the concentration of power.
Will Durant
#24. You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.
Donald McCaig
#25. E.B. White's essays are the best things I've read about Maine - especially the one in which he's not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop.
Nicholson Baker
#27. I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.
Chris Abani
#28. I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.
Sam Abell
#29. There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
A.S. Byatt
#30. I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like What I'm Going to be If I Grow Up
Lenny Bruce
#31. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.
Jess Walter
#32. I verily believe that the kingdom of God advances more on spoken words than it does on essays written and read; on words, that is, in which the present feeling and thought of the teaching mind break into natural and forceful expression.
Richard Salter Storrs
#33. I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays.
Henry David Thoreau
#34. Doctrines, scriptures, sutras, essays, are not to be regarded as systems to be followed. They merely contribute to understanding. They should be for us a source of stimulation, and nothing more ... Adopted, rather than used as a stimulus, they are a hindrance
Wei Wu Wei
#35. Somewtimes I wrote random stuff in the middle of my essays, just to see if my teachers would say anything. No one ever did.
Kami Garcia
#36. Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.
David Herbert Donald
#37. I think my blog is fairly circumspect and elliptical. I've written personal essays, but they are short and to the point: in and out, and that's that.
Kate Christensen
#38. Some people desire to be famous. I probably wouldn't be very good at it.
Sarah Warman
#39. Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
Barbara Kingsolver
#40. For the average civilized person to whom, as to Patrick Henry, even death is acceptable in the absence of liberty.
Federico Mangahas
#41. Which meant I spent my spare time learning theory, studying dead languages and reading books like Essays on The Metaphysical by John "never saw a polysyllabic word he didn't like" Cartwright.
Ben Aaronovitch
#42. I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.
Laura Esquivel
#43. Oftentimes, when people don't respond to text messages or emails, I just start writing long, long in-depth essays and diatribes where characters start to appear and narrative threads begin.
Lucas Neff
#44. Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
Nicholson Baker
#45. Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes.
Susan Sontag
#46. Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.
Margaret Fuller
#47. I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.
Jane Hirshfield
#48. The wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#49. One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.
Tobias Wolff
#50. I aspire to write what are called 'familiar essays.' They begin in the personal and end in the universal. It's not for me to say if I have been successful at it. But that is the hope.
David Rakoff
#51. When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#52. Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things.
Ross Douthat
#53. He stood and watched the night push itself into the bar and the light push it back out.
David Berman
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
