Top 58 William Dean Howells Quotes
#1. How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!
William Dean Howells
#2. A friend knows how to allow for mere quantity in your talk, and only replies to the quality.
William Dean Howells
#3. A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it's too late to let her know that he sees it.
William Dean Howells
#4. Do not trouble yourselves about standards or ideals; but try to be faithful and natural: remember that there is no greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth to your own knowledge of things; and keep on working, even if your work is not long remembered.
William Dean Howells
#5. The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested.
William Dean Howells
#6. It's very odd ... that some values should have this peculiarity of shrinking. You never hear of values in a picture shrinking; but rents, stocks, real estate
all those values shrink abominably.
William Dean Howells
#7. It's astonishing how well the worse reason looks when you try to make it appear the better.
William Dean Howells
#8. By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is ugly, and it is only the ugly that is universal.
William Dean Howells
#9. We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world ... but I am more and more puzzled about it in the moral world. There its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatsoever.
William Dean Howells
#10. If he was not commonplace, it was through nothing remarkable in his mind, which was simply clear and practical, but through some combination of qualities of the heart that made men trust him, and women call him sweet
a word of theirs which conveys otherwise indefinable excellences.
William Dean Howells
#11. See how today's achievement is only tomorrow's confusion;See how possession always cheapens the thing that was precious.
William Dean Howells
#12. Out of the fragrant heart of bloom, The bobolinks are singing; Out of the fragrant heart of bloom The apple-tree whispers to the room, Why art thou but a nest of gloom While the bobolinks are singing?
William Dean Howells
#13. You'll find as you grow older that you weren't born such a great while ago after all. The time shortens up.
William Dean Howells
#14. What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.
William Dean Howells
#15. People are born and married, and live and die, in the midst of an uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it.
William Dean Howells
#16. The action is best that secures the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
William Dean Howells
#18. She had conquered, but she had also necessarily lost much. Perhaps what she had lost was not worth keeping; but at any rate she had lost it.
William Dean Howells
#19. It seems to me a proof of the small advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do.
William Dean Howells
#23. We are creatures of the moment; we live from one little space to another, and only one interest at a time fills these.
William Dean Howells
#24. Every one is expected to look out for himself here. I fancy that there would be very little rising if men were expected to rise for the sake of others, in America.
William Dean Howells
#25. Tomorrow I shall be sixty-nine, but I do not seem to care. I did not start the affair, and I have not been consulted about it at any step.
William Dean Howells
#26. The wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and sorrow.
William Dean Howells
#27. Forest to their fields of corn and tobacco on the fertile slopes and rich bottom-lands. The
William Dean Howells
#28. In Europe life is histrionic and dramatized, and in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere.
William Dean Howells
#30. There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.
William Dean Howells
#32. The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.
William Dean Howells
#33. Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.
William Dean Howells
#34. The conqueror is regarded with awe; the wise man commands our respect; but it is only the benevolent man that wins our affection.
William Dean Howells
#35. Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the foot of the feudal system!
William Dean Howells
#36. The disposition to give a cup of cold water to a disciple is a far nobler property than the finest intellect. Satan has a fine intellect, but not the image of God.
William Dean Howells
#39. Preach the blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our eight-inch guns.
William Dean Howells
#41. It is the curse of prosperity that it takes work away from us, and shuts that door to hope and health of spirit.
William Dean Howells
#42. Lord, for the erring thoughtNot into evil wrought:Lord, for the wicked willBetrayed and baffled still:For the heart from itself kept,Our thanksgiving accept.
William Dean Howells
#45. If we like a man's dream, we call him a reformer; if we don't like his dream, we call him a crank.
William Dean Howells
#46. All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.
William Dean Howells
#48. The novelist might be greater possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation, but for the most part they have been and are altogether noxious.
William Dean Howells
#50. Wisdom and goodness are twin-born, one heart must hold both sisters, never seen apart.
William Dean Howells
#52. New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay but prince or pauper, it's gay always ... Yes, gay is the word ... but frantic. I can't get used to it. They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New York.
William Dean Howells
#55. The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you.
William Dean Howells
#58. It is the still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom.
William Dean Howells
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