I started to work on this book in 1954, when, having been called to active duty in the Navy, I was relieved of the burdens of a full-time psychoanalytic practice... Within a year of its publication, the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene demanded, in a letter citing specifically 'The Myth Of Mental Illness', that I be dismissed from my university position because I did not "believe" in mental illness.
thomas szaszAfter the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
jean cocteauHe used to say that personal beauty was a better introduction than any letter; 18 but others say that it was Diogenes who gave this description of it, while Aristotle called beauty "the gift of God"; that Socrates called it "a short-lived tyranny"; Theophrastus , "a silent deceit"; Theocritus , "an ivory mischief"; Carneades , "a sovereignty which stood in need of no guards".
diogenes laërtiusLife is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter- writing.
george eliotThe diocesan papers are full of stories about atrocities in China and the sufferings of the Church and I get a letter from Betty Chang from Tientsin about the communes and the full-employment, etc. When we see the migrant camps, and our factories in the fields, our system does not offer much.
dorothy dayWhen Henry Mulcahy, a middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President's letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer.
mary mccarthyA wonderfully funny letter was sent to me signed by a fraternity in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., medical school; the fraternity for doctors had voted me the body on which they would most like to operate.
dyanne thorneIn either event he could only adhere to the letter of the law, but then for every yea in the law there was a nay, and it always boiled down to simple expediency. Like a psychiatric diagnosis, it could always be juggled around to fit anything you chose.
mark cliftonWords are transient, and vanish in the air as soon as spoken, and there can be no tenor of them . . . but when a thing is written, though every omission of a letter may not make a variance, yet, if such omission makes a word of another signification, it is fatal.
Your peers will respect you for your integrity and character, not your possessions.
David RobinsonThere is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's, than in all TomJones.
As to those who have debarred themselves from the Revelation of God, they have indeed failed to understand the significance of a single letter of the Qur’án, nor have they obtained the slightest notion of the Faith of Islám, otherwise they would not have turned away from God, Who hath brought them into being, Who hath nurtured them, hath caused them to die and hath proffered life unto them, by clinging to parts of their religion, thinking that they are doing righteous work for the sake of God.
bábSomebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
ernest hemingwayI have owed you this letter for a very long time — but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.
john steinbeckGoethe said, “The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: “I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.” These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
Randall JarrellI regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.
Pauline KaelI must say the enclosed letter from Rütten and Loening is a bit stiff. Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of 'arisch' origin from all persons of all countries? ... I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.
j. r. r. tolkienThe only road, the sure road to unquestioned credit and a sound financial condition is the exact and punctual fulfilment of every pecuniary obligation, public and private, according to its letter and spirit.
For Maggie has written a letter to give me my choice between The wee little whimpering Love and the great god Nick O'Teen. And I have been servant of Love for barely a twelvemonth clear, But I have been priest of Partagas a matter of seven year. And the gloom of my bachelor days is flecked with the cherry light Of stumps that I burned to friendship, and pleasure and work and fight.
rudyard kiplingThe advent of other Greek letter fraternities met the social needs or supposed needs of underclass men and left Phi Beta Kappa to give sole concern to scholarly affairs.
By our rules we cannot receive a letter from a friend.
Although Hinduism has no official symbol, the religious symbol most sacred to most Hindus is the mythical syllable Om [also spelled aum]...the symbol is composed of equivalent of our letter a, u, and m. Although as a syllable it has no literal meaning, Om symbolizes the fundamental hidden reality of the universe and is the basic spiritual sound the universe makes, particularly the sound of World Soul.
It's a letter to my dad...it's got blood on it..