88 Quotes by 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.

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

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 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.

It is difficult to be ambitious without also being envious.

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

Those who consider themselves good teachers probably aren't.

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

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