30 Quotes by Van Wyck Brooks

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

A man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man. 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. They like a man who expresses their own superficial thoughts in a manner that appears to be profound. This enables them to feel that they are themselves profound.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.