Essayist

🇬🇧Virginia Woolf

Literature

Bloomsbury Group

1882–1941

"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves."

🇫🇷Oscar Wilde

Literature

Aestheticism

1854–1900

"[On Bernard Shaw] An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him."

Michel de Montaigne

Philosophy

1533–1592

"He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live."

🇮🇳Mahatma Gandhi

Politics

nonviolence

1869–1948

""The only real, dignified, human doctrine is the greatest good of all, and this can only be achieved by uttermost self-sacrifice.""

🇺🇸Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature

Western philosophy

1803–1882

"He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses."

🇫🇷Albert Camus

Literature

continental philosophy

1913–1960

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

Leo Tolstoy

Literature

literary realism

1828–1910

"There is only one time that is important -- NOW! It is the most important time because it is the only time that we have any power."

🇺🇸Henry David Thoreau

Literature

Western philosophy

1817–1862

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.."

🇿🇦David Hume

Philosophy

Empiricism

1796–1864

"The conclusion [of the essay 'Of the Protestant Succession'] shows me a Whig, but a very sceptical one."

Sigmund Freud

Psychology

1856–1939

"A woman is to soften but not weaken a man."

🇫🇷Jean-Paul Sartre

Philosophy

Existentialism

1905–1980

"I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens."

🇫🇷Voltaire

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1694–1778

"The king has sent me some of his dirty linen to wash; I will wash yours another time."

🇫🇷Marcel Proust

Literature

1871–1922

"On ne reçoit pas la sagesse, il faut la découvrir soi-même après un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous épargner."

🇺🇸Edgar Allan Poe

Literature

Romanticism

1872–1961

"Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant."

🇩🇪Carl Jung

Psychology

1852–1924

"You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return."

🇺🇸Walt Whitman

Literature

Transcendentalism

1819–1892

"Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful stroke!"

🇧🇷Victor Hugo

Literature

French Romanticism

1802–1885

"What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul"

🇫🇷Simone de Beauvoir

Philosophy

Existentialism

1908–1986

"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion"

🇺🇸Theodore Roosevelt

Politics

1858–1919

"Let us speak courteously, deal fairly, and keep ourselves armed and ready."

🇦🇷Jorge Luis Borges

Literature

1899–1986

"Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die."

Rabindranath Tagore

Music

Bengali Renaissance

1861–1941

"God, the Great Giver, can open the whole universe to our gaze in the narrow space of a single land."

🇺🇸Christopher Hitchens

Philosophy

atheism

1949–2011

"Peace through Strength," surely history's most exploded nostrum."

🇺🇸Thomas Mann

Literature

"The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed."

🇬🇧Richard Dawkins

Science

atheism

b. 1941

"We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?"

🇺🇸Sylvia Plath

Literature

1932–1963

"How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into."

Slavoj Žižek

Philosophy

Lacanianism

b. 1949

"If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them."

🇺🇸Philip Roth

Literature

1933–2018

"The New York Times Featured Author: Philip Roth"

🇺🇸Thomas Pynchon

Literature

1760–1796

"Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts."

🇺🇸David Foster Wallace

Literature

Postmodernism

1962–2008

"Betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle's always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave"

🇺🇸Gore Vidal

Literature

postmodern literature

1925–2012

"You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country."

🇺🇸Saul Bellow

Literature

1915–2005

"For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it."

🇫🇷James Baldwin

Social Activism

1924–1987

"Audio files of speeches and interviews at UC Berkeley"

🇮🇹Umberto Eco

Literature

1932–2016

"I don't even have an E-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages."

🇳🇬Chinua Achebe

Literature

1930–2013

"The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place."

Milan Kundera

Literature

1929–2023

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo."

Hannah Arendt

Philosophy

phenomenology

1906–1975

"If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress."

🇺🇸Don DeLillo

Literature

b. 1936

"I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it."

🇺🇸Maya Angelou

Literature

1928–2014

"I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me "I love you." … There is an African saying which is: "Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt."

🇫🇷Guy Debord

Philosophy

Situationist International

1931–1994

"With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning."

🇺🇸Ralph Ellison

Literature

1914–1994

"Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in."