Quote

People of small calibre are always carping. How affected so-and-so is! Don't you think he is silly? He was certainly quite mistaken about this or that. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or their prowess or good breeding.

Van Wyck Brooks

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Van Wyck Brooks
Age: 77 †
Born: 1886
Born: February 16
Died: 1963
Died: May 2
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Plainfield
New Jersey
People
Silly
Prowess
Certainly
Caliber
Quite
Breeding
Small
Superiority
Knowledge
Bent
Good
Mistaken
Always
Showing
Calibre
Think
Affected
Carping

More quotes by Van Wyck Brooks

Image
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.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
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.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
Better the fragrant herb of wit and a little cream of affability than all the pretty cups in the world.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
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.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
Nothing is sadder than the consequences of having worldly standards without worldly means.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
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.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
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.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
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.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
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.
Van Wyck Brooks
Image
If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?
Van Wyck Brooks