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 »
It may not be impossible, but that our Faculties may be so construed, as always to deceive us in the things we judge most certain ...and assured.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility, there still remains the possibility of... our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry.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 »
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this--as in other ways--they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings... record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.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 photo of someone else's childhood, a garden in another country--world... he had no part in and has no power to imagine: yet the old man who has failed his memory keens over the picture-- 'Them happy days-- gone--gone for ever!'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 be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »