Van Wyck Brooks
Van Wyck Brooks
Van Wyck Brookswas an American literary critic, biographer, and historian...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth16 February 1886
CountryUnited States of America
motivational vanity people
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.
jealousy vanity people
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.
writing important territory
The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.
self-esteem ancestry heredity
Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
jobs men giving
If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?
religious ignorance political
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.
views point-of-view
Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.
successful men he-man
The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.
beautiful writing rainy-day
As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.
people sides serious
Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.
book mind said
The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.
book years two
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.
want vivid talent
Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.
war creativity men
The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.