Van Wyck Brooks Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I will have one of the cleanest obits of any actress. I never did cheesecake like Ann Sheridan or Betty Grable. I just used my hair.

Veronica Lake

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

Van Wyck Brooks

#4. 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 political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few.

Van Wyck Brooks

#5. 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 swans.

Van Wyck Brooks

#6. The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an Orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them.

Van Wyck Brooks

#7. What is true is that if we do not change the culture of Washington, D.C., the United States of America will cease.

Steve Southerland

#8. 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 three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.

Van Wyck Brooks

#9. My style has always been very free, easy, relaxed, and slightly androgynous.

Erin Wasson

#10. I spit upon the dancers painted by Degas. I spit upon their short bodies, their stiff stays, their toes whereupon they spin like peg-tops, above all upon that chambermaid face. They might have looked timeless, Remeses the Great, but not the chambermaid, that old maid history. I spit! I spit! I spit!

W.B.Yeats

#11. Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.

Van Wyck Brooks

#12. It's not the poverty of material abundance but the poverty of love makes life miserable.

Debasish Mridha

#13. He loves me."
"You sound surprised."
"Nobody ever did. Not like this. It's easy to say, for some people. The words. But it's not just words with Roarke. He sees inside me, and it doesn't matter.

J.D. Robb

#14. Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.

Van Wyck Brooks

#15. 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 the surface of the water.

Van Wyck Brooks

#16. The art of longing's over, and it's never coming back.

Leonard Cohen

#17. You make people happy. When you're in front of a crowd, nobody can think about their problems or their worries or anything else. You have a gift, Kes, an amazing wonderful gift. It's special, just like you.

Jane Harvey-Berrick

#18. If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?

Van Wyck Brooks

#19. Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.

Van Wyck Brooks

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

Van Wyck Brooks

#21. The wise man should keep the balance between love and power; he should keep the love in his nature ever increasing and expanding, and at the same time strengthen the will so that the heart may not easily be broken.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

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

Van Wyck Brooks

#23. 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

#24. I did not clip the wings of my daughter to fly.

Ziauddin Yousafzai

#25. 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 more, they find it everywhere.

Van Wyck Brooks

#26. 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

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

Van Wyck Brooks

#28. No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.

Van Wyck Brooks

#29. Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means.

Van Wyck Brooks

#30. Every morning when I first wake up, I thank God I do not get as much government as I pay for.

Steve Krupnik

#31. Sometimes it's as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness - these are the only things that are real.

J.P. Delaney

#32. (on Warner Brothers) This studio has more suspensions than the Golden Gate Bridge.

Humphrey Bogart

#33. Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.

Van Wyck Brooks

#34. Don't polish it forever, put it out there. At some point the changes aren't improvements, they're just changes.

Dan Alatorre

#35. Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.

Van Wyck Brooks

#36. As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.

Van Wyck Brooks

#37. The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.

Van Wyck Brooks

#38. 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 world around them.

Van Wyck Brooks