Quote

Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.

Sinclair Lewis

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Sinclair Lewis
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Writer
Sauk Centre
Minnesota
Harry Sinclair Lewis
Conventional
Criticize
Better
Live
Much
Think
Thinking
Scrupulously
Customs

More quotes by Sinclair Lewis

Image
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
Indians, of course, have no theology, and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No it is something dead.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
What is Love? Listen! It is the rainbow that stands out, in all its glorious many-colored hues, illuminating and making glad again the dark clouds of life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature's hearts to an uplifted rejoicing in God's marvelous firmament!
Sinclair Lewis
Image
That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don't wish to do.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called patriotism and love of sport.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
Sinclair Lewis
Image
Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.
Sinclair Lewis