Joseph Epstein Quotes
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We do not choose to be born.We do not--most of us, choose to die, or the times or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live--Courageously or in cowardice, Honorably or dishonorably, With purpose or adrift. We decide what is important and what is trivial. What makes us significant is what we DO, Or REFUSE TO DO. WE DECIDE and WE CHOOSE--and so we give definition to our lives.
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Courage is nine-tenths context. What is courageous in one setting can be foolhardy in another and even cowardly in a third.
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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.
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No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.
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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.
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Always seek the general and never quite trust it.
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Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.
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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.
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While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.
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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.
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I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.
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In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.
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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.
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Food has it over sex for variety. Hedonistically, gustatory possibilities are much broader than copulatory ones.
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A cat is the only domestic animal I know who toilet trains itself and does a damned impressive job of it.
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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.
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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.
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One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.
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I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.
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We do choose how we shall live
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Political correctness and so many of the political fashions of the day...could only be perpetrated in adolescent minds: minds, that is, that are trained to search out one thing and one thing only...Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses, the possibility of slights, real and imagined.
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We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.
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I am married to someone I love.
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Envy is never general, but always very particular - at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.
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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.
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What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, and what we do to make them come about.
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That wine drinking is more effete than beer drinking? No question.
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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.
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What, really, is wanted from a neighborhood? Convenience, certainly, an absence of major aggravation, to be sure. But perhaps mostof all, ideally, what is wanted is a comfortable background, a breathing space of intermission between the intensities of private life and the calculations of public life.
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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.
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