Van Wyck Brooks Quotes

• Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means.

  Van Wyck Brooks

  Tags in Standards

• 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

  Topics in Knowledge

  Tags in Restraints

• The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.

  Van Wyck Brooks

  Tags in Successful, Platitudes

• The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.

  Van Wyck Brooks

  Tags in Creative, Impulses

• 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

  Tags in Newspapers, English

• 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

  Tags in Caliber, Prowess

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Sailing, Vessel

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Everywhere, Jealousy

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Swans, Geese

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Giving, Evil

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

  Van Wyck Brooks

  Topics in Genius

  Tags in Clothed

Van Wyck Brooks (11)

Birth:	16th February, 1886
Death:	2nd May, 1963
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic, Historian, Biographer

About

Van Wyck Brooks was an American literary critic, biographer, and historian. Brooks was educated at Harvard University and graduated in 1908. As a student there, he published his first book: a collection of poetry called Verses by Two Undergraduates, co-written with his friend John Hall Wheelock.

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Today's Anniversary - 22nd November

Births

• 1961 - Mariel Hemingway
• 1916 - Percy Ross
• 1986 - Oscar Pistorius
• 1927 - Nathan Rosenberg
• 1934 - Nicolas Hardy Walter

Deaths

• 1992 - Sterling Price Holloway Jr.
• 1997 - Michael Hutchence
• 2001 - Mary Kay Ash
• 1943 - Lorenz Hart
• 1774 - Robert Clive