All Quotes

"Enthusiasm is supernatural serenity."

"The language of excitement is at best but picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles."

"Even the best things are not equal to their fame."

"What is commonly called friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues."

"Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes."

"The violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate. When it is durable, it is serene and equable. Even its famous pains begin only with the ebb of love, for few are indeed lovers, though all would fain be."

"Love is a severe critic. Hate can pardon more than love."

"It is strange that men will talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains."

"There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages."

"Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion; as if the short spring days were an eternity."

"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."

"The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect."

"Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men."

"If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see."

"A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus."

"That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest."

"The future, wave or no wave, seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done."

"I am a parcel of vain strivings tied By a chance bond together, Dangling this way and that, their links Were made so loose and wide, Methinks, For milder weather."

"But now I see I was not plucked for naught, And after in life's vase Of glass set while I might survive, But by a kind hand brought Alive To a strange place."

"Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth."

"Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf Than that I may not disappoint myself, That in my action I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye."

"The life that I aspire to live No man proposeth me— No trade upon the street Wears its emblazonry."

"My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read, 'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large Down in the meadow, where is richer feed, And will not mind to hit their proper targe."

"We received a letter from the Writers' War Board the other day asking for a statement on "The Meaning of Democracy." It is presumably our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure. Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don't in don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles, the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of the morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is."

"Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough, What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town, If juster battles are enacted now Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?"

"Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams — Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword."

"Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma."

"There is a decivilizing bug somewhere at work; unconsciously persons of stern worth, by not resenting and resisting the small indignities of the times, are preparing themselves for the eventual acceptance of what they themselves know they don’t want."

"Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn't. And everybody is always somewhere else."

"All poets who, when reading from their own works, experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not."

"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

"Government is the thing. Law is the thing. Not brotherhood, not international cooperation, not security councils that can stop war only by waging it... Where does security lie, anyway — security against the thief, a bad man, the murderer? In brotherly love? Not at all. It lies in government."

"When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?"

"I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears so much as your editorial, on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic."

"Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going."

"I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles."

"The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. All dwellers in cities must dwell with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm."

"No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."

"Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying."

"When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed."

"Salutations"

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."

"We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny... The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witchhunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist."

"An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write."

"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority."

"One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy."

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

"Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same."

"An unhatched egg is to me the greatest challenge in life."

"As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the one thing left to us in a bad time."