Top 61 Joseph Epstein Quotes
#1. The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein.
Karl Shapiro
#2. Of all the seven deadly sins, only Envy is no fun at all.
Joseph Epstein
#3. That wine drinking is more effete than beer drinking? No question.
Joseph Epstein
#4. I am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can't unplug me.
Joseph Epstein
#5. A cat is the only domestic animal I know who toilet trains itself and does a damned impressive job of it.
Joseph Epstein
#6. ...that envy and a sense of injustice are not always that easily distinguished, let alone extricated, one from the other.
Joseph Epstein
#7. If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?
Joseph Epstein
#8. Envy is never general, but always very particular - at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.
Joseph Epstein
#9. The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that one of the signs of being cold today is that one knows what one doesn't have to know.
Joseph Epstein
#10. I believe it was Gayelord Hauser, the nutritionist, who said, 'You are what you eat,' but if you happen to be an intellectual, you are what you quote.
Joseph Epstein
#11. Vladimir Nabokov, contemning readers who "identified" with characters in fiction, remarked that the best readers identify with the artist.
Joseph Epstein
#12. We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents, or the country of our birth.
We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death.
But within this realm of choicelessnness, we do choose how we live.
Joseph Epstein
#13. The problem for me is that reading is, I won't say a sacred, but nevertheless a pretty serious act.
Joseph Epstein
#15. The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.
Joseph Epstein
#16. I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks.
Joseph Epstein
#17. I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.
Joseph Epstein
#18. I should prefer to die laughing, and, on more than one occasion, thought I might.
Joseph Epstein
#19. The reason 'closure' is a cliche is that it is used too often, too imprecisely, and doesn't in any case reflect reality. In reality, such closure in broken friendships and much else in life is rarely achieved; only death brings closure and then not always for those still living.
Joseph Epstein
#20. Getting rid of most of my personal library comported nicely with my longheld fantasy of traveling light, existing with minimal encumbrances, living simply. A fantasy it has always been, for the longr I have lived, the heavier has my equipage grown.
Joseph Epstein
#21. We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.
Joseph Epstein
#24. Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.
Joseph Epstein
#26. One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.
Joseph Epstein
#27. No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.
Joseph Epstein
#28. The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.
Joseph Epstein
#29. Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.
Joseph Epstein
#30. Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads ...
Joseph Epstein
#32. Not everyone strives to be fashionable. I don't, and I believe I succeed.
Joseph Epstein
#33. Generalization, especially risky generalization, is one of the chief methods by which knowledge proceeds ... Safe generalizations are usually rather boring. Delete that "usually rather." Safe generalizations are quite boring.
Joseph Epstein
#34. To be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment ...
Joseph Epstein
#35. The pleasure of jogging and running is rather like that of wearing a fur coat in Texas in August: the true joy comes in being able to take the damn thing off.
Joseph Epstein
#37. In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.
Joseph Epstein
#38. Food has it over sex for variety. Hedonistically, gustatory possibilities are much broader than copulatory ones.
Joseph Epstein
#39. That there are limitations to the Jewish response of humor when Jews today face murderous, humorless terrorists in the Middle East or the cowardly politicians of Europe seeking the votes of their increasingly Muslim electorates.
Joseph Epstein
#40. [Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.
Joseph Epstein
#41. What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams ... and what we do to make them come about.
Joseph Epstein
#42. What all great teachers appear to have in common is love of their subject, an obvious satisfaction in rousing this love in their students, and an ability to convince them that what they are being taught is deadly serious
Joseph Epstein
#43. Someone - Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? - once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.
Joseph Epstein
#44. The best joke-tellers are those who have the patience to wait for conversation to come around to the point where the jokes in their repertoire have application.
Joseph Epstein
#45. The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one's thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum.
Joseph Epstein
#46. Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.
Joseph Epstein
#47. I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.
Joseph Epstein
#48. One serious drawback about letters is that, in order to get them, one must send some out. When it comes to the mail, I feel it is better to receive than to give.
Joseph Epstein
#49. For reasons no one has yet explained, the Internet is at once riveting and a great killer of concentration.
Joseph Epstein
#50. My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can't.
Joseph Epstein
#51. We who are quotatious are never truly alone, but always hear the cheerful flow of remarks made by dead writers so much more intelligent than we.
Joseph Epstein
#52. Those who consider themselves good teachers probably aren't.
Joseph Epstein
#54. Courage is nine-tenths context. What is courageous in one setting can be foolhardy in another and even cowardly in a third.
Joseph Epstein
#55. By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don't hesitate.
Joseph Epstein
#56. I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.
Joseph Epstein
#57. No one can yet tell me why I am able to forget what I wrote in articles and reviews that I once felt passionate about, and yet am able to recall the entire lyrics of Some Enchanted Evening
Joseph Epstein
#59. High standards generally
about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else
far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life.
Joseph Epstein
#60. A writer can get into a vast deal of trouble through misquotation. If you ever want to receive lots of mail, I recommend you get a Shakespeare quote wrong in a magazine or newspaper.
Joseph Epstein
#61. For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery
Joseph Epstein
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