Book Quote by Van Wyck Brooks

Better the fragrant herb of wit and a little cream of affability than all the pretty cups in the world.

— Van Wyck Brooks

The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.

— Van Wyck Brooks

Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.

— Van Wyck Brooks

The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an Orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making…

— Van Wyck Brooks

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

— Van Wyck Brooks

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over…

— Van Wyck Brooks

The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.

— Van Wyck Brooks

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,…

— Van Wyck Brooks

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.

— Van Wyck Brooks

People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding.

— Van Wyck Brooks

Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what…

— Van Wyck Brooks

How delightful is the company of generous people, who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in…

— Van Wyck Brooks