Edmund Wilson Quotes & Sayings

#1. The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.

#2. Only the curious will learn and only the resolute will overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.

Edmund Wilson

#3. He believes, but he does not believe: the impossibility of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full of weeping for a child to understand.

Edmund Wilson

#4. The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagination.

Edmund Wilson

#5. An acquaintance with the great works of art and thought is the only real insurance against the barbarism of the time.

Edmund Wilson

#6. I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.

Edmund Wilson

#7. No two persons ever read the same book.

Edmund Wilson

#8. In his novels from beginning to end, Dickens is making the same point always: that to the English governing classes the people they govern are not real.

Edmund Wilson

#9. In times of disorder and stress, the fanatics play a prominent role; in times of peace, the critics. Both are shot after the revolution.

Edmund Wilson

#10. While the romantic individualist deludes himself with unrealizable fantasies, in the attempt to evade bourgeois society, and only succeeds in destroying himself, he lets humanity fall a victim to the industrial-commercial processes, which, unimpeded by his dreaming, go on with their deadly work.

Edmund Wilson

#11. Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.

Edmund Wilson

#12. I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.

Edmund Wilson

#13. No two person, ever read the same book.

Edmund Wilson

#14. If I could only remember that the days were, not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.

Edmund Wilson

#15. Keep going; never stop; sit tight; Read something luminous at night.

Edmund Wilson

#16. His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.

Edmund Wilson

#17. There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.

Edmund Wilson

#18. They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.

Edmund Wilson

#19. All Hollywood corrupts; and absolute Hollywood corrupts absolutely.

Edmund Wilson

#20. At 60 the sexual preoccupation, when it hits you, seems sometimes sharper, as if it were an elderly malady, like gout.

Edmund Wilson

#21. Capitalism has run its course, and we shall have to look for other ideals than the ones that capitalism has encouraged.

Edmund Wilson

#22. The Jew lends himself easily to Communism because it enables him to devote himself to a high cause, involving all of humanity, characteristics which are natural to him as a Jew.

Edmund Wilson

#23. The great mistake about Europe is taking the countries seriously and letting them quarrel and drop bombs on one another.

Edmund Wilson

#24. What a gulf between the self which experiences and the self which describes experience.

Edmund Wilson

#25. Every work of art is a trick by which the artist manipulates appearances.

Edmund Wilson

#26. In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.

Edmund Wilson

#27. The most immoral and disgraceful and dangerous thing that anybody can do in the arts is knowingly to feed back to the public its own ignorance and cheap tastes.

Edmund Wilson

#28. She was one of those women whose features are not perfect and who in their moments of dimness may not seem even pretty, but who, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful.

Edmund Wilson