Van Wyck Brooks

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means.”

“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.”

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

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