Van Wyck Brooks Quotes
23 quotes
in 314 categories
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Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is…
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People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding.
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The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.
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As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.
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No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or…
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Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.
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Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.
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No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.
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The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.
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How delightful is the company of generous people, who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in the…
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Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.
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The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.
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The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.
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Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.
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If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?
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A man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man. The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an orphic manner…
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It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for…
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Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means.
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There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the…
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How delightful is the company of generous people, who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in the…
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