Joseph Epstein Quotes & Sayings

Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things. — 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

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

Of all the seven deadly sins, only Envy is no fun at all. — Joseph Epstein

Courage is nine-tenths context. What is courageous in one setting can be foolhardy in another and even cowardly in a third. — 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

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. — Joseph Epstein

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

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

By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don't hesitate. — Joseph Epstein

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. — Joseph Epstein

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

If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses? — Joseph Epstein

The best joke-tellers are those who have the patience to wait for conversation to come around to the point where the jokes in their repertoire have application. — Joseph Epstein

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. — Joseph Epstein

I am the heterosexual Truman Capote. — Joseph Epstein

Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food. — Joseph Epstein

That wine drinking is more effete than beer drinking? No question. — Joseph Epstein

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 ... — Joseph Epstein

I am married to someone I love. — Joseph Epstein

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. — Joseph Epstein

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

What all great teachers appear to have in common is love of their subject, an obvious satisfaction in rousing this love in their students, and an ability to convince them that what they are being taught is deadly serious — Joseph Epstein

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. — 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

We who are quotatious are never truly alone, but always hear the cheerful flow of remarks made by dead writers so much more intelligent than we. — Joseph Epstein

I myself think anti-Semitism is about envy. — Joseph Epstein

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

The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that one of the signs of being cold today is that one knows what one doesn't have to know. — Joseph Epstein

No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain. — Joseph Epstein

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

For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery — Joseph Epstein

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

We know the ideal isn't where the action is. — Joseph Epstein

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

One of the reasons that most literary artists are contemptuous of Sigmund Freud - whose thought Vladimir Nabokov once characterized as no more than private parts covered up by Greek myths - is that his extreme determinism is felt to be immensely untrue to the rich complexity of life, with its twists and turns and manifold surprises. — Joseph Epstein

I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent. — Joseph Epstein

I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks. — Joseph Epstein

One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism. — Joseph Epstein

No one has really ever defined what a friend is. — Joseph Epstein

I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me. — 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

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. — Joseph Epstein

I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism - of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow. — 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

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. — Joseph Epstein

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. — 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

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

Envy is never general, but always very particular - at least envy of the kind one feels strongly. — Joseph Epstein

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. — Joseph Epstein

Those who consider themselves good teachers probably aren't. — Joseph Epstein

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

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

To be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment ... — Joseph Epstein

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. — Joseph Epstein

The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section. — Joseph Epstein

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. — Joseph Epstein

I think the story is my form. — Joseph Epstein

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

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. — 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

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

That there are limitations to the Jewish response of humor when Jews today face murderous, humorless terrorists in the Middle East or the cowardly politicians of Europe seeking the votes of their increasingly Muslim electorates. — Joseph Epstein

We do choose how we shall live — Joseph Epstein

The problem for me is that reading is, I won't say a sacred, but nevertheless a pretty serious act. — Joseph Epstein

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

Food has it over sex for variety. Hedonistically, gustatory possibilities are much broader than copulatory ones. — Joseph Epstein

In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins. — Joseph Epstein

Vladimir Nabokov, contemning readers who "identified" with characters in fiction, remarked that the best readers identify with the artist. — Joseph Epstein

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. — Joseph Epstein

I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive. — Joseph Epstein

Always seek the general and never quite trust it. — Joseph Epstein