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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
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Van Wyck Brooks
Age: 77 †
Born: 1886
Born: February 16
Died: 1963
Died: May 2
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Plainfield
New Jersey
Traits
Esteem
Family
Seems
Forebears
Find
Absolve
Nothing
Heredity
Self
Ancestry
Soothing
More quotes by Van Wyck Brooks
Nothing is sadder than the consequences of having worldly standards without worldly means.
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The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.
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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.
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The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.
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If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?
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No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.
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As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.
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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.
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Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.
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Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.
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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.
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The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.
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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.
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Better the fragrant herb of wit and a little cream of affability than all the pretty cups in the world.
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Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.
Van Wyck Brooks
Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.
Van Wyck Brooks
