Quotes from Joseph Epstein

We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.

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.

Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.

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.

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.

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.

Not everyone strives to be fashionable. I don't, and I believe I succeed.

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.

that envy and a sense of injustice are not always that easily distinguished, let alone extricated, one from the other.

I should prefer to die laughing, and, on more than one occasion, thought I might.

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

It is difficult to be ambitious without also being envious.

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.

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.

What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams . . . and what we do to make them come about.

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.

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

The best way to ensure that your writing is as good as you can make it is simply to consult your imagination and judgment as you write and take note of whether you are using an expression that has found its way into the stream simply because it's always there, swirling lifelessly in an eddy, where it was recently deposited by some other writer you have read.

The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.

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

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.

Those who consider themselves good teachers probably aren't.

America, which he never visited, he called "that monstrous prison of freedom . . . where the most repulsive of tyrants, the populace, holds vulgar sway" and "all men are equal—equal dolts

Salzman didn't believe that telling your troubles helped make them better, which was why he had never undertaken psychotherapy.