Letter Quotes
More Letter Quotes
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 szasz— Preface to the Second Edition
After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
jean cocteau— On the journal of Franz Kafka; diary entry (7 June 1953); Past Tense: Diaries Vol. 2 (1988)
Life 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 eliot— Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 8 June 1856. Collected in The George Eliot Letters, edited by G. S. Haight (1954), volume 2.
I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better Knowledge, sent to where I met him, down the Lachlan, years ago. He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him, Just 'on spec', addressed as follows: 'Clancy, of the Overflow'. And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected, (And I think the same was written with a thumbnail dipped in tar) 'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it: 'Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are.'
Banjo (Andrew Barton) Paterson— 1895 'Clancy of the Overflow', first published in the Bulletin, collected in The Man from Snowy River and OtherVerses (1895).
The 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 day— 12 February 1959
When 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 mccarthy— The Groves of Academe (1952) First lines
In 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 clifton— p. 79 (They'd Rather Be Right (1954))
He 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 laërtius— The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 5: The Peripatetics, Aristotle, 9.
Your peers will respect you for your integrity and character, not your possessions.
David Robinson— Letter to My Younger Self (November 22, 2016)
Je n'ai fait plus longue que parce queje n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal— 1657 Lettres provinciales, letter16.
Never answer an anonymous letter.
yogi berra— As quoted in He Who Laughs, Lasts (2004) by Anson R. Nash, Jr., p. 108
The delight of the Torah is ignited by an inner awareness. A man begins to sense the great tapestry of each letter and point. Every concept and content, every notion and idea, of every spiritual movement, of every vibration, intellectual and emotional, from the immediate and general to the distant and detailed, from matters lofty, spiritual, and ethical according to their outward profile, to matters practical, obligatory, seemingly frightening, and forceful, and at the same time complex and full of content and great mental exertion — all together become known by a supernal holy awareness.
abraham isaac kook— XXVIII : The Inner Light of Torah in the Land of Israel, as translated by Rabbi Bezalel Naor, p. 208.
Avant-garde art has become habitual, a dead letter with little spiritual consequence, however materially refined.
— "Reconsidering the Spiritual in Art", Blackbird (2003)
It is no small comfort that God hath written some Scriptures to you which He hath not to others. Read these, and think God is like a friend who sendeth a letter to a whole house and family, but who speaketh in His letter to some by name that are dearest to Him in the house.
samuel rutherford— P. 270. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
The Bible is a warm letter of affection from a parent to a child; and yet there are many who see chiefly the severer passages. As there may be fifty or sixty nights of gentle dews in one summer, that will not cause as much remark as one hailstorm of half an hour, so there are those who are more struck by those passages of the Bible that announce the indignation of God than by those that announce His affection.
thomas de witt talmage— Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 30.
A 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 thorne— Fabian Paffendorf (November, 2003). Dyanne Thorne Interview. wicked-vision.com. Retrieved on 2007-09-30.
— (also available in German)
This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me The simple News that Nature told With tender Majesty Her Message is committed To Hands I cannot see For love of Her Sweet countrymen Judge tenderly of Me
— 441: This is my letter to the World
And swear No where Lives a woman true and fair. If thou find'st one, let me know, Such a pilgrimage were sweet; Yet do not, I would not go, Though at next door we might meet, Though she were true, when you met her, And last, till you write your letter, Yet she Will be False, ere I come, to two, or three.
john donne— Song (Go and Catch a Falling Star), stanzas 2-3.
"She ends her letter, characteristically, by picturing me and her other critics as indifferent to the suffering of women. But many feminists, including several who wrote or spoke to me about my review, regret her single-minded concentration on lurid sex. They think that though it has predictably attracted much publicity, it tends to stereotype women as victims, and takes attention from still urgent questions of economic, political, and professional equality."
catharine mackinnon— "Pornography: An Exchange", response by Ronald Dworkin to Catherine Mackinnon, New York Review of Books 41(5), March 3, 1994.
Your recent meetings with Chinese dissidents at the White House are to be commended. However, your participation at the opening ceremony of the Olympics will send a signal to the Chinese people and the international community that could be misperceived as your approval, and that of the American people, for the draconian policies of the Chinese government. Therefore, it is essential that you unambiguously speak out for human rights and meet with the families of jailed prisoners of conscience while you are in Beijing. (In a letter to President Bush prior to his 2008 trip to Beijing's Summer Olympic Games
nancy pelosi— (August 1, 2008). Pelosi to Bush: It Is Essential That You Speak Out for Human Rights During Visit to China for the Olympics. Press release. Retrieved on 2008-11-08.
When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.
edith wharton— The Children (1928), ch. XXV
Thomas Jefferson, in letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816) -
— Attributed to Senator John Sherman in a letter supposedly sent from the Rothschild Bros. of London to New York bankers Ikleheimer, Morton, and Vandergould, on 25 June 1863. The letters are forgeries that could not have been written before 1876. Further, no evidence of a firm with the name "Ikleheimer, Morton, and Vandergould" has been found.
The letter is too long by half a mile.
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (c. 1595-6), Act V, scene 2, line 54.
If this letter move him not, his legs cannot. I'll give 't him.
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (c. 1601-02), Act III, scene 4, line 188.
As you are aware, this firm represents Mercury Radio Arts, Inc. and Glenn Beck. Despite our letter yesterday demanding that you delete the Defamatory Domain, suspend and/or terminate your provision of WhoisGuard privacy protection services to the unknown individual who sought to register the domain, and provide us with information identifying the unknown individual, we note that as of Friday, September 4, 2009 at approximately 6:35 EDT, the Defamatory Domain remains active.
— Letter from lawyers for Glenn Beck to registrar of website; cited in — Cook, John (September 9, 2009). "Glenn Beck, PR Genius, Spreads the False Rumor He Raped and Murdered a Young Girl in 1990". Gawker (Gawker Media). Retrieved on 2009-10-04.
Even if only by a letter (d in place of th), we fundamentally differ Pandeism from Pantheism.
— Max Bernhard Weinsten, Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Nature") (1910), page 227: "Wenn auch nur durch einen Buchstaben (d statt th), unterscheiden wir grundsätzlich Pandeismus vom Pantheismus."
I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell, And by and by my Soul returned to me, And answered "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell."
omar khayyám— Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat, FitzGerald's Trans.
You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.
john adams— 1813 Letter to Thomas Jefferson,15 Jul.
There is smoke and grease there is the wrist exhaustion , there is laughter , there is the letter seized in the clock and the apple's tang, the river sliding along its banks. darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these black waters that contain the day that passed, the night to come.
— Philip Levine, in [ The Mercy: Poems], Random House LLC, 7 September 2011, p.23
