Believe Quote by John D'Agata

Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped…

— John D'Agata

But, if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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…

— William Ernest Henley

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

— Karl Kraus

“one who, though he never digress to read a Lecture, Moral or Political, upon his own Text, nor enter into men’s hearts, further than…

— Thomas Hobbes

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general…

— E. B. White

The essayist . . . can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject…

— E. B. White

If there is a category of human being for whom his work ought to speak for itself, it is the writer.

— Isaac Asimov

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general…

— E. B. White

“The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to…

— John Steinbeck

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

— Aldous Huxley

“I thought to myself, who is this excellent man Van Doren who being employed to teach literature, teaches just that: talks about writing and…

— Thomas Merton