"Essayist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it is commonly believed that such a reader overestimates the weight of works of fiction, the opposite is true—he underestimates it. Every novelist of genuine importance seeks not merely to divert but also to instruct—to instruct, not abstractly, like the essayist, but concretely, by presenting to the reader characters and actions which are true. For the best fiction, although it deals with the lives of imaginary people, is no less true than the best history and biography, which record actual facts of human life; and it is more true than such careless ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... so much to think about that it desires not to be more encumbered than it can help. Such men as the late Lord Lytton, for example, are, in one respect, a nuisance to it. Bulwer was about equally distinguished as a novelist, as a dramatist, and as an essayist; and, ever since, the average man has been puzzled whether to think of him as the author of 'Pelham,' the author of 'The Lady of Lyons,' or the author of 'Caxtoniana.' Bulwer tried hard to establish a position as a poet, ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... with which they began to sputter at one another, on the supposition that each was mocking his neighbor. A short-hand writer, behind the scenes, was employed to take down the conversation, which, says the witty essayist, was easily done, inasmuch as one of the gentlemen was a quarter of an hour in saying "that the ducks and green peas were very good," and another almost an equal time in assenting to it. At the conclusion, however, the derided guests became ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Park on the west bank, is the home of John Burroughs, our sweetest essayist, the nineteenth century's "White of Selborne." Judge Barnard of Poughkeepsie, once said to the author of this handbook, "The best writer America has produced after Hawthorne is John Burroughs; I wish I could see him." It so happened that there had been an important ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... called heroisms which we are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolise the name. Cunning is the only resource of the feeble; and why may we not feel for victorious cunning as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open bearing of the strong? That there may be no mistake in the essayist's meaning, that he may drive the nail home into the English understanding, he takes an illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern thought, the free and noble nature of ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... popular poet, the charming novelist, the successful dramatist, and the witty essayist," wrote a popular history of Greece, in two volumes, 8vo, 1774, embracing a period from the earliest date down to the death of Alexander the Great. It is an attractive work, elegantly written, but is ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... ignorant of men, and the more he collected the more he found that out. No doubt, if he had kept entirely to one science, he would have been more skilled therein; but he said he liked that idea of a famous essayist, who compared a man who devoted himself entirely to one thing, to a tree that sent forth a tremendously great bough in one direction, while the rest of the tree was composed of wretched little twigs. He considered ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... county friends in his apprehension of the flavour bestowed by the man; and having him, he had made them conscious of their deficiency. His cook, M. Dehors, pupil of the great Godefroy, was not the only French cook in the county; but his cousin and secretary, the rising scholar, the elegant essayist, was an unparalleled decoration; of his kind, of course. Personally, we laugh at him; you had better not, unless you are fain to show that the higher world of polite literature is unknown to you. Sir Willoughby could create an abject ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... appeal to the public, and to ask them to agree with me against my friends. It is not only that Cicero has touched all matters of interest to men, and has given a new grace to all that he has touched; that as an orator, a rhetorician, an essayist, and a correspondent he was supreme; that as a statesman he was honest, as an advocate fearless, and as a governor pure; that he was a man whose intellectual part always dominated that of the body; that in taste ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... has something like the same steadiness in the market, but the prices he can command are much lower, and the two branches of the novelist's trade are not to be compared in a business way. As for the essayist, the poet, the traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in the competition for the favor of readers. The reviewer, indeed, has a pretty steady call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers who get a hundred dollars a thousand words could all stand upon the point of a needle without ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... have, says the reverend author, what one would not expect, many light toyish books (novels and plays, doubtless), others on Rosycrucian subjects, and of an abstruse mystical character; but they have no Bibles or works of devotion. The essayist fails not to mention the elf-arrow heads, which have something of the subtlety of thunderbolts, and can mortally wound the vital parts without breaking the skin. These wounds, he says, he has himself observed in beasts, and felt the ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... attitude towards life, as you may see when he writes of his favourite eighteenth century in his own fascinating style. How angry he becomes with the vices and corruption of a dead past! Now no Oxford essayist would dream of being angry with the past. How annoyed the sentimental author of The Four Georges would be with Mr. Street's genial treatment of the same epoch! It would, however, be the annoyance of a father for his eldest son, whom he sent ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... without being well known to the public, if he had not united to them the ability to write elegant and forcible English. The circumstances of the time made literary talents unusually valuable. The daily press has driven the essayist out of the political field. But for several generations elaborate disquisitions upon politics had been usual in England; in this regard pamphlets then occupied the place of our newspapers. Bolingbroke, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... poet, a dramatist, an essayist, and a novelist, besides writing many political, geographical, and biographical sketches. As a poet, his fame is steadily waning. The tendency at first was to rank him too high, owing to the undeniable charm of many of the poems ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had a peculiar style in his speeches and public documents. It was criticised as labored and that of an essayist. I asked him, after he had retired to private life, how he had acquired it. He said his father was a clergyman and he had been educated by him largely at home. His father was very particular about his compositions and his English, so that he acquired a ministerial style. The result of this ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... Bachelier, Chevalier de Beaupuy, was born at Mussidan, in Perigord, on the 15th of July 1757. He belonged to a noble family, less proud of its antiquity than of the blood it had shed for France on many battlefields. On his mother's side (Mlle. de Villars), he reckoned Montaigne, the celebrated essayist, among his ancestors. His parents having imbibed the philanthropic ideas of the time, educated him according to ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... our misfortune that of good essayists there should be but few. Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Carlyle's case the one is as hearty as the other. The only point on which critics are fairly well agreed is that his rugged independence of mind and his picturesque style appealed powerfully to a small circle of readers in England and to a large circle in America. It is doubtful whether any other essayist, with the possible exception of the serene and hopeful Emerson, had a more stimulating influence on the thought of the latter half of the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... American novelist and essayist, was born on July 4, 1804, at Salem, Massachusetts. His father, a master mariner, died early, and the boy grew up in a lonely country life with his mother. He graduated at Bowdoin College, but his literary impulse ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... rabble, and cared not to share with them well and fire and fruit." His Kingdom of Green was consumed and became grey by the regard of his coldly measuring eye. For him modern man is an animal who bores himself. Laforgue is an essayist who is also a causeur. His abundance is never exuberance. Without sentiment or romance, nevertheless, he does not suggest ossification of the spirit. To dart a lance at mythomania is his delight, while preserving the impassibility of a Parnassian. His travesties of ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... giving preference to the claims of money. The moneyed man is ever the friend of Majesty,—but the brilliant man of letters is left out in the cold. Yet it is the man of letters who chronicles the age, and who will do so, we may be sure, according to his own experience. As the King treats the essayist, the romancist or the historian, so will these recording scribes ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... Imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal? If the young men told the truth, where had been the truth in his own young days, and in what ignorance had our forefathers been brought up?—Mr. Addison was only an elegant essayist, and shallow trifler! All these opinions were openly uttered over the Colonel's claret, as he and Mr. Binnie sate wondering at the speakers, who were knocking the gods of their youth about their ears. To Binnie the shock was not so great; the hard-headed Scotchman had read Hume in his college ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... light could fall upon their books. Fred Esquillant was to be a great scholar and to do my father infinite credit when he went to the university. For me I was only a reader of English, a scribbler of verses in that language, a paltry essayist, with no sense of the mathematics and no more than an average classic. Therefore in the school I was a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water to ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... is, people sacrifice too much to their friends. Especially after the friends are dead. "The cream of the joke is," as our lively essayist remarks, "that the dead do not dream of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... grown with some rapidity into a writer recognised and welcomed by the more cultivated sections of the American public, and even known to a select circle of British readers. To his American discoverers he had first appeared as an essayist, a serious essayist who wrote about aesthetics and Oriental thought and national character and poets and painting. He had come through America some years ago as one of those Kahn scholars, those promising writers and intelligent men endowed by Auguste Kahn of ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... I ever saw in France; I have been wet through nearly every day of travel since the second (inclusive); besides this, I have had to fight against pretty mouldy health; so that, on the whole, the essayist and reviewer has shown, I think, some pluck. Four days ago I was not a hundred miles from being miserably drowned, to the immense regret of a large circle of friends and the permanent impoverishment of British Essayism and Reviewery. My boat culbutted ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... residents of Tarrytown have been Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, well known to a previous generation for her romantic novels, John Kendrick Bangs, the humorist, and Hamilton Wright Mabie, editor and essayist. Carl Schurz (1829-1906) is buried here in the Sleepy Hollow churchyard. Tarrytown is the trading center of a prosperous agricultural region; it also has about 100 manufacturing establishments with a large output. ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous |
