34 Quotes by Max Eastman

There is something self-defeating in the too-conscious pursuit of pleasure.

Patriotism is one of the unalterable facts of man’s nature. It is a virtue if you like it, and a vice if you don’t like it.

I don’t know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while.

A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener’s mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn’t expect to go.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind.

I wonder how many revolutions will be required before grown-up people learn not to say to children, ‘I had those same ideas when I was your age.