Famous quotes containing the word escapes:
“As I am writing my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my weakness, which I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“That reality is ‘independent’ means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)