Authors

Famous quotes containing the word authors:

    We rarely quote nowadays to appeal to authority ... though we quote sometimes to display our sapience and erudition. Some authors we quote against. Some we quote not at all, offering them our scrupulous avoidance, and so make them part of our “white mythology.” Other authors we constantly invoke, chanting their names in cerebral rituals of propitiation or ancestor worship.
    Ihab Hassan (b. 1925)

    Age appears to be best in four things—old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
    Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

    Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to set them right.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)