Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.
Van Wyck Brooks

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

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

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

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

Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means.
Van Wyck Brooks

People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding.
Van Wyck Brooks

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me... by newspapers and the Bible.
Van Wyck Brooks

The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.
Van Wyck Brooks

The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.
Van Wyck Brooks


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