A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us ...in, not out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The work is rather too light, bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long<...br />chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique of Walter Scott, or a history of Buonaparte, or anything that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Essay writing is perhaps ... the easiest for the author and requires little more than what is called a fluency of words and a viva...city of expression to avoid dullness; but without ... a real foundation of matter ... an essay writer is very apt, like Dogberry in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, to think that if he had the tediousness of a king, he would bestow it all upon his readers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Twas something we knew all about to begin with And needn't have fared into space like his master... To find 'twas the effort, the essay of love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat ga...udy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent hist...ory of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of "Munich" may exceed the original error of 1938.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but p...ure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so l...eisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The primary imperative for women who intend to assume a meaningful and decisive role in today's social change is to begin to perce...ive themselves as having an identity and personal integrity that has as strong a claim for being preserved intact as that of any other individual or group.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »