Revolutionary Quotes
Category: Quotes
Date of Birth: October 16, 1911
Date of Death: April 11, 1944
Nationality: Polish
By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don't hesitate.
Joseph Epstein
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
Envy is never general, but always very particular - at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.
Joseph Epstein
I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.
Joseph Epstein
I am married to someone I love.
Joseph Epstein
I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.
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
I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.
Joseph Epstein
I know how deeply slothful I am.
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 myself think anti-Semitism is about envy.
Joseph Epstein
I should prefer to die laughing, and, on more than one occasion, thought I might.
Joseph Epstein
I think the story is my form.
Joseph Epstein
In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.
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
No one has really ever defined what a friend is.
Joseph Epstein
Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.
Joseph Epstein
Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.
Joseph Epstein
One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.
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
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
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
We know the ideal isn't where the action is.
Joseph Epstein
Thursday, December 4, 2008
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1 comments on "Joseph Epstein Quotes"
These quotations are useful because of the following:
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In January 1992, in the middle of the Baha’i Holy Year commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Ascension of Baha’u’llah, the Canadian poet Roger White sent me a copy of Joseph Epstein’s Plausible Prejudices, a collection of Epstein’s essays. By 1992 I had been writing essays for over 30 years, mostly for academic institutions. I had been writing essays seriously, but still not successfully in terms of getting anything published, in the secular press from 1962 to 1982.
Roger sent me Epstein’s book of essays in the year before he died in 1993. Epstein has written many more essays since Plausible Prejudices and some of it is now found in my files in my study.
I too had much more writing to do. I had only begun to take writing seriously in 1992 after 30 years of tinkering at the edges, so to speak.
A full-time job, family responsibilities and Baha’i community commitments made the writing experience, at least until 1992, a peripheral one. After 50 years of trying to write essays in several academic communities and in the Baha’i community (1957-2007), I felt in 2007 as if I had just begun, as if I had finally made the kind of beginning that had a very real future.
Roger White’s gift to me in 1992 was timely because essay writing was and would be a continuing process much more so than I realized at the time. The essay was the form in which I had analysed his poetry in the book The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature: The Poetry of Roger White. And in various ways the essay, in a very abbreviated form of course, was also part of the short preambles to my poetry that in 1992 began to occupy so much of my time.
In July 2005, at the age of 60, I finally found another editor to work at my autobiography which had ballooned to more than 1000 pages and by the age of 63 a Baha’i editor appeared; he did some editing of my 2600 page memoirs.
Epstein’s style of essay writing had become a model for me as I wrote the second and succeeding editions of my autobiography. But I was not that overtly conscious of his style. On October 3rd 2005 I looked Epstein up on the internet and printed some 50 pages of his thoughts on writing and several of his essays thinking to myself it was time I took Epstein seriously and perhaps essay writing in general more seriously. After 14 years of being aware of his existence, the time had come to draw on his talents more extensively. And so I opened a file of his works.
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