Joseph Epstein > Quotes

“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, Friendship: An Exposé

“Of all the seven deadly sins, only Envy is no fun at all.”
― Joseph Epstein, Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins

“All men and women are born, live suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. 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 choicelessness, we do choose how we live.”
― Joseph Epstein

“We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.”
― Joseph Epstein

“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, A Line Out For a Walk

“[Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.”
― Joseph Epstein

“Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone one the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil-in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn't think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one's heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one's naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions.”
― Joseph Epstein

“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.”
― Joseph Epstein

“I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established that one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy--once you have these in place, you are set to go.”
― Joseph Epstein

“.....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 choicelessness, we do choose how we live.”
― Joseph Epstein

“ 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

“Not everyone strives to be fashionable. I don't, and I believe I succeed.”
― Joseph Epstein, Snobbery: The American Version – The National Bestseller Skewering Elitism in Food, Fashion, and Politics

“What seems clear to me,' Karl Wertheimer joined in, 'is that Eli Black believes in the myth of the artist. This is a myth that holds that everything must be sacrificed for art. It may not be a foolish myth if one is, say, Michelangelo or Beethoven. But if one is less than that then the myth of the artist is very destructive, sadly so for people who become too closely involved with him.”
― Joseph Epstein

“It is difficult to be ambitious without also being envious.”
― Joseph Epstein, Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins

“What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams . . . and what we do to make them come about.”
― Joseph Epstein

“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, With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays

“...that envy and a sense of injustice are not always that easily distinguished, let alone extricated, one from the other.”
― Joseph Epstein, Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins

“I should prefer to die laughing, and, on more than one occasion, thought I might.”
― Joseph Epstein

“For reasons no one has yet explained, the Internet is at once riveting and a great killer of concentration.”
― Joseph Epstein

“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

“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

“Meanwhile, things continue to slide: standards slip, curricula are politicized and watered down, and, despite all the emphasis on schooling at every level of society, the dance of education remains locked into the dreary choreography of one step forward, two steps back. Education remains education, which is to say a fairly private affair. No matter how much more widespread so-called higher education has become, only a small—one is inclined to say an infinitesimal—minority seems capable of taking serious advantage of it, at any rate during the standard years of schooling.”
― Joseph Epstein, Literary Education and Other Essays

“Comrade” was a word much in vogue under Communism, which tried to foist equality even on friendship by making all men and women equally one’s friend in the forthcoming (it hasn’t quite arrived yet) just society. But in the social sense friendship isn’t about equality. Quite the reverse. By its nature friendship is preferential: one chooses one person over another to draw closer to; an element of exclusivity is implied in the word “friend.”
― Joseph Epstein, Friendship: An Expose

“The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.”
― Joseph Epstein

“Without that strong personal presence, the essay doesn't quite exist; it becomes an article, a piece, or some other indefinable verbal construction.”
― Joseph Epstein

“Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.”
― Joseph Epstein, Literary Education and Other Essays

“Reading is experience. A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read.”
― Joseph Epstein

“A cat is the only domestic animal I know who toilet trains itself and does a damned impressive job of it.”
― Joseph Epstein

“And it is a good thing that many ideas have a relatively short shelf-life. Some because they are bad, even pernicious ideas: the Master Race, the class struggle, the Oedipus complex, and Socialism are four bad ideas with wretched consequences that come immediately to mind.”
― Joseph Epstein, Literary Education and Other Essays

“Yet, for the person of literary education, all ideas, as Orwell felt ought to be the case with all saints, are guilty until proven innocent.”
― Joseph Epstein, Literary Education and Other Essays