Top 50 Joseph Epstein Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Joseph Epstein

Featured in: Fun Quotes

2. “I am married to someone I love.”

— Joseph Epstein

3. “Within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.”

— Joseph Epstein

4. “I know how deeply slothful I am.”

— Joseph Epstein

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

— Joseph Epstein

6. “What all great teachers appear to have in common is love of their subject, an obvious satisfaction in rousing this love in their students, and an ability to convince them that what they are being taught is deadly serious.”

— Joseph Epstein

7. “We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.”

— Joseph Epstein

8. “We do choose how we shall live.”

— Joseph Epstein

9. “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.”

— Joseph Epstein

10. “Courage is nine-tenths context. What is courageous in one setting can be foolhardy in another and even cowardly in a third.”

— Joseph Epstein

11. “In recompense, envy may be the subtlest – perhaps I should say the most insidious – of the seven deadly sins.”

— Joseph Epstein

12. “Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.”

— Joseph Epstein

13. “The pleasure of jogging and running is rather like that of wearing a fur coat in Texas in August: the true joy comes in being able to take the damn thing off.”

— Joseph Epstein

14. “We who are quotatious are never truly alone, but always hear the cheerful flow of remarks made by dead writers so much more intelligent than we.”

— Joseph Epstein

15. “The best joke-tellers are those who have the patience to wait for conversation to come around to the point where the jokes in their repertoire have application.”

— Joseph Epstein

16. “By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don’t hesitate.”

— Joseph Epstein

17. “Envy is never general, but always very particular – at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.”

— Joseph Epstein

18. “My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can’t.”

— Joseph Epstein

19. “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.”

— Joseph Epstein

20. “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.”

— Joseph Epstein

21. “That wine drinking is more effete than beer drinking? No question.”

— Joseph Epstein

22. “I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks.”

— Joseph Epstein

23. “A writer can get into a vast deal of trouble through misquotation. If you ever want to receive lots of mail, I recommend you get a Shakespeare quote wrong in a magazine or newspaper.”

— Joseph Epstein

24. “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.”

— Joseph Epstein

25. “I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.”

— Joseph Epstein

26. “I am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can’t unplug me.”

— Joseph Epstein

27. “I myself think anti-Semitism is about envy.”

— Joseph Epstein

28. “Someone – Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? – once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.”

— Joseph Epstein

29. “I think the story is my form.”

— Joseph Epstein

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

30. “Not everyone strives to be fashionable. I don’t, and I believe I succeed.”

— Joseph Epstein

31. “I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.”

— Joseph Epstein

32. “Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.”

— Joseph Epstein

Featured in: Reading Quotes

33. “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.”

— Joseph Epstein

34. “No one has really ever defined what a friend is.”

— Joseph Epstein

35. “The problem for me is that reading is, I won’t say a sacred, but nevertheless a pretty serious act.”

— Joseph Epstein

Featured in: Reading Quotes

36. “One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don’t have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.”

— Joseph Epstein

37. “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.”

— Joseph Epstein

38. “No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.”

— Joseph Epstein

39. “One serious drawback about letters is that, in order to get them, one must send some out. When it comes to the mail, I feel it is better to receive than to give.”

— Joseph Epstein

40. “For reasons no one has yet explained, the Internet is at once riveting and a great killer of concentration.”

— Joseph Epstein

41. “I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.”

— Joseph Epstein

42. “For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery.”

— Joseph Epstein

43. “I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.”

— Joseph Epstein

44. “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.”

— Joseph Epstein

45. “It is difficult to be ambitious without also being envious.”

— Joseph Epstein

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

— Joseph Epstein

47. “The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.”

— Joseph Epstein

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

— Joseph Epstein

49. “Always seek the general and never quite trust it.”

— Joseph Epstein

50. “Those who consider themselves good teachers probably aren’t.”

— Joseph Epstein