Joseph Epstein Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

.....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.

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.

It is difficult to be ambitious without also being envious.

Moldovans, most of whom will never be able to afford the products advertised—unless they sell a kidney. Joseph Epstein, in his book on envy, described the entire advertising industry as “a vast and intricate envy-producing machine.” In Moldova, all of that envy has nowhere to dissipate; it just accumulates, like so much toxic waste.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Those who consider themselves good teachers probably aren't.

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

Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.

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

Joseph made clear, it is not just the mother that has to be released from perfection. It is everything.

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.

Without that strong personal presence, the essay doesn't quite exist; it becomes an article, a piece, or some other indefinable verbal construction.

Reading is experience. A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read.

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

On meditation Real Happiness, Sharon Salzberg Insight Meditation, Joseph Goldstein On Buddhism and mindfulness in general Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, Dr. Mark Epstein Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor

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.

Donald Trump is worth I don’t know how many millions, but his confident vulgarity will always keep him from being viewed as other than monstrously rich (perhaps more monster than rich), and if he were to be certified as upper class, many others put in that category would doubtless do what they could to find a new social class to fit into.

Comrade” was a word much in vogue under Communism, which tried to foist equality even on friendship by making all men and women equally one’s friend in the forthcoming (it hasn’t quite arrived yet) just society. But in the social sense friendship isn’t about equality. Quite the reverse. By its nature friendship is preferential: one chooses one person over another to draw closer to; an element of exclusivity is implied in the word “friend.

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.

The automobile, like the all-important domestic façade, is another mechanism for outdoor class display. Or class lack of display we'd have to say, if we focus on the usages of the upper class, who, on the principle of archaism, affect to regard the automobile as very nouveau and underplay it consistently. Class understatement describes the technique: if your money and freedom and carelessness of censure allow you to buy any kind of car, you provide yourself with the meanest and most common to indicate that you're not taking seriously so easily purchasable and thus vulgar a class totem. You have a Chevy, Ford, Plymouth, or Dodge, and in the least interesting style and color. It may be clean, although slightly dirty is best. But it should be boring. The next best thing is to have a "good" car, like a Jaguar or BMW, but to be sure it's old and beat-up. You may not have a Rolls, a Cadillac, or a Mercedes. Especially a Mercedes, a car, Joseph Epstein reports in The American Scholar (Winter 1981-82), which the intelligent young in West Germany regard, quite correctly, as "a sign of vulgarity, a car of the kind owned by Beverly Hills dentists or African cabinet ministers.

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

A man who always carried a well-lubricated status detector, he settled in at Harvard.

In an otherwise perfectly mediocre presidency, the one savvy thing John F. Kennedy did, at least for his own reputation, was to bring these Cambridge intellectuals on board.

If the novel is an instrument of discovery, what it sets out to discover are bits of that still unsolvable and greatest of all great mysteries, human nature.

there is no faculty so weak as the English faculty,” which is “the common catch-all for aspirants to the birch who are too lazy or too feeble in intelligence to acquire any sort of exact knowledge, and the professional incompetence of its typical ornament is matched only by his hollow cocksureness.” In a passing reference to Emory University he mentions “the students there incarcerated.

Yiddish mensch becomes a clear approbative, a man of honor and integrity, but it also means a real, a genuine person, someone who is even possibly flawed but has known travail, yet has come through not only

felony muscles

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

wasn’t like today, when if you don’t tell your kid you love him every twenty minutes you could go to jail for child abuse.

the so-called sexual revolution, for example, “rather a prim term for the lurid carnival that actually took place.

systematically murderous totalitarian system of all, conspired in their own death, was yet a fourth savant-idiot. The classic American savant-idiot, surely, was Susan Sontag. This is the Susan Sontag who called white civilization “the cancer of human history”;

so many artists and scientists, the youthful Zweig found school a great bore.

When I say that democracy has no place in the university, I mean that the university is, or at any rate was and ought still to be, a hierarchical institution, as befits an elite enterprise. The hierarchy is based upon scholarly and scientific accomplishment. The accomplishment makes for authority.

Each university president has merely kept the pot boiling without noticing what wretched fare was cooking inside it. None has prevented or even slowed any of the continuing rot of the humanities and social sciences within their institution, nor even thought to do so.

the Soviet experiment as “an absurd horror film stretching over 70 years.” Government-organized famine, hideous show trials, brutal gulags, mass murder, life in the Soviet Union made the plagues that fell upon Egypt seem a week in the Catskills.

In Communist countries they take writers very seriously—so seriously that they often kill them.

The devil, of course, was totalitarianism, in particular fascism and Communism, which promised its adherents heaven and brought them unmitigated hell.

what’s left of me if you take my work away? I’m not sure there’s anything left.” “Whaddya mean?

He was most alive at his business. He loved his wife, or thought he did. But did he miss Miriam? At first, yes, a lot, but by now days, whole weeks, went by when he didn’t think about her.

Someone’s going to drag me out of someplace feet-first, so it might as well be from my place of business. Besides, if I retire, what do you suggest I do, chase golf balls with the rest of the morons? Maybe I should take courses in Chinese stamp collecting or the history of Peru at Loch in Kop University downtown?

Bette Newboldt, our unappeasable feminist whom, I’m fairly certain, God Himself could not have made happy;

College education is highly overrated. Take it from a man who dispensed it.

A poem is never finished,” said Valéry, “but only abandoned.

The reason I no longer take any interest in mental games, I have concluded, is that I do mental work, and consequently seem to have little in the way of mental energy left for mental play.

Again, Anthony Powell notes of another of his characters that he spoke a number of foreign languages with facility, and that, as with all people who speak foreign languages easily, he was not quite to be trusted.

Buddhist teachings have long emphasized the importance of being less “self-involved.” When we are fearful and anxious, we are concerned about our self and its well-being. These are autonoetic thoughts about one’s health, family, friends, wealth, life, death, and so on. Our conscious self, according to Mark Epstein, who is a Buddhist psychoanalyst, will do almost anything to maintain the independence, power, control, or success that it has achieved, even if to do so other people, other cultures, or the world has to suffer.192 A healthier approach, Epstein says, is to let go of the “absolute self” that we construct and recognize our broader role in life.

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

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.

The Jews have been victim to a general envy by the unsuccessful for the successful. Forced out of their homeland 2,000 years ago by Roman oppression, they spread across Europe and prospered spectacularly in many places, including Vienna and Berlin, till Hitler took over. Joseph Epstein tells us that in the ‘Vienna of 1936, a city that was 90 per cent Catholic and 9 per cent Jewish, Jews accounted for 60 per cent of the city’s lawyers, more than half its physicians, more than 90 per cent of its advertising executives, and 123 of its 174 newspaper editors. And this is not to mention the prominent places Jews held in banking, retailing, and intellectual and artistic life. The numbers four or five years earlier for Berlin are said to have been roughly similar.’61 Is it surprising that Nazism had its greatest resonance in these two cities? Before killing the Jews, Germans and Austrians felt the need to humiliate their victims: ‘They had Jewish women cleaning floors, had Jewish physicians scrubbing the cobblestone streets of Vienna with toothbrushes as Nazi youth urinated on them and forced elderly Jews to do hundreds of deep knee bends until they fainted or sometimes died. All this suggests a vicious evening of the score that has the ugly imprint of envy on the loose. The Jews in Germany and Austria had succeeded not only beyond their numbers but also, in the eyes of the envious,

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He never bragged about how well he had done in business, but it was clear that he was pleased by the fact that, living by his few tight moral maxims—keep your overhead low, don't live beyond your means, always put something away for a rainy day—he had come out a winner. Always a methodical businessman, my

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.

Being an anti-capitalist and hence being able to blame capitalism—often known more simply as “the system”—for any failure I might encounter through my own lack of talent or absence of energy not only provided me with a fine fallback position, but permitted me to view anyone who labored at a workaday job in the system with a rather lofty contempt.

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.

Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.

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 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.

One famous Japanese haiku illustrates the state that Sid managed to discover in himself. It is one that Joseph Goldstein has long used to describe the unique attentional posture of bare attention:                                          The old pond.                                          A frog jumps in.                                          Plop!2 Like so much else in Japanese art, the poem expresses the Buddhist emphasis on naked attention to the often overlooked details of everyday life. Yet, there is another level at which the poem may be read. Just as in the parable of the raft, the waters of the pond can represent the mind and the emotions. The frog jumping in becomes a thought or feeling arising in the mind or body, while “Plop!” represents the reverberations of that thought or feeling, unelaborated by the forces of reactivity. The entire poem comes to evoke the state of bare attention in its utter simplicity.

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 Greeks took envy to be part of human nature, running at differing intensities in differing people, but always there, ever ready to emerge, like a coiled snake, seemingly asleep but easily stirred into poisonous attack.

The job, in Schopenhauer’s steady view, is rarely brought off in a successful way. For in “the boundless egotism of our nature there is joined more or less in every human breast a fund of hatred, anger, envy, rancor, and malice, accumulated like the venom in a serpent’s tooth, and waiting only an opportunity of venting itself and then, like a demon unchained, of storming and raging.” Not exactly what we should nowadays call a fun guy, Schopenhauer.

Most of us could still sleep decently if accused of any of the other six deadly sins; but to be accused of envy would be seriously distressing, so clearly does such an accusation go directly to character.

The don in Crampton Hodnet being gossiped about does not win much sympathy as a victim, for, about to go off on a trip with a colleague he does not much like, he thinks that "at least they would be able to have a good talk about old times, rejoicing over those of their contemporaries who had not fulfilled their early promise and belittling those who had.

I wanted my students to come away from their reading learning, for example, from Charles Dickens the importance of friendship, loyalty, and kindness in a hard world; from Joseph Conrad the central place of fulfilling one’s duty in a life dominated by spiritual solitude; from Willa Cather, the dignity that patient suffering and resignation can bring; from Tolstoy, the divinity that the most ordinary moments can provide—kissing a child in her bed goodnight, working in a field, greeting a son returned home from war; and from Henry James, I wanted them to learn that it is the obligation of every sentient human being to stay perpetually on the qui vive and become a man or woman on whom nothing is lost, and never to forget, as James puts in his novel The Princess Casamassima, that “the figures on the chessboard [are] still the passions and the jealousies and superstitions of man.

Susan Sontag as “just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review.

no contemporary painting could have any serious standing without a critical theory certifying and explaining it. Twenty-five years from

the criterion a wealthy character sets for buying art is “that a picture should repel his sense and intelligence. Only then could he be sure of having bought a valuable modern work.

surely better to be a nation than to be mistreated by one.” The Jews “are forced to be a ‘nation’ by the nationalism of the others,

Hyde Park seemed a good place for high-IQ misfits, blessed with dazzling minds or imaginations but unequipped to take life straight on;

Alongside the self-obsession they display and the victimhood they claim, current-day students often shout down speakers whose views they don’t approve,

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

During the Vietnam War, Sontag went off to Hanoi as one of those people Lenin called “useful idiots”—that is, people who could be expected to defend Communism without any interest in investigating the brutality behind it.

Trevor-Roper never granted Waugh intellectual respect, but did acknowledge that in face-to-face confrontations he could not win, owing to Waugh’s superior rudeness.

We are reminded of the court-parasites of the Roman Empire, of whom Juvenal wrote: the bad jokes of Fortune—village pierrots yesterday, arbiters of life and death today,

In one of the papers he wrote for the All Souls fellowship, he referred to Rousseau’s Confessions as “a lucid journal of a life so utterly degraded that it has been a bestseller in France ever since.

The problem is that Sontag wasn’t sufficiently interested in real-life details, the lifeblood of fiction, but only in ideas. She also wrote and directed films, which were not well reviewed: I have not seen these myself, but there is time enough to do so, for I have long assumed that they are playing as a permanent double feature in the only movie theater in hell.

His waiting for Teddy left Schlesinger rather in the position of the poor village idiot paid by his shtetl to sit at the outskirts of town awaiting the arrival of the messiah.

but he wished Trilling didn’t say even the most obvious things in a tone of voice more appropriate for announcing a cure for cancer.

In The Truants, William Barrett’s splendid memoir of the Partisan Review crowd, Barrett recalls Delmore Schwartz remarking, “ ‘Analytic exuberance’—Philip Rahv’s euphemism for putting a knife in your back.

Although it is probably the sheerest economic jealousy on my part, it lifts my spirits to discover that someone driving a Rolls-Royce looks sad. In traffic I never give such people a break; nor do I give a break to people who drive Cadillacs, Mercedeses, Jaguars, or BMWs; I figure that they have already had their breaks in life.

Once, when Szell stormed out of the Metropolitan Opera, someone said that he was his own worst enemy. To which Rudolf Bing responded, “Not while I’m alive.