Van Wyck Brooks Quotes

23 quotes in 314 categories

• 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…
• People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding.
• The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.
• As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.
• 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…
• Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.
• Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.
• No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.
• The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.
• 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…
• Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.
• The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.
• The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.
• Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.
• If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?
• 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…
• 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…
• Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means.
• 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…
• 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…

Browse Van Wyck Brooks Quotes by Category