Edmund Wilson Quotes

Only the curious will learn and only the resolute will overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since being shot by Booth was to have fallen into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.

At 60 the sexual preoccupation, when it hits you, seems sometimes sharper, as if it were an elderly malady, like gout.

While the romantic individualist deludes himself with unrealizable fantasies, in the attempt to evade bourgeois society, and only succeeds in destroying himself, he lets humanity fall a victim to the industrial-commercial processes, which, unimpeded by his dreaming, go on with their deadly work.

Capitalism has run its course, and we shall have to look for other ideals than the ones that capitalism has encouraged.

On the one hand, I have wanted to supply documentation on myself by including material relevant to my emotions and ideas in my youth; and, on the other, not to let myself down by publishing inferior material. My poetry comes under the latter head. My only advice to the reader is to skip any verse that he sees coming.

She was one of those women whose features are not perfect and who in their moments of dimness may not seem even pretty, but who, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful.

His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals

In his novels from beginning to end, Dickens is making the same point always: that to the English governing classes the people they govern are not real.

It is a proof of the divergence of the tendencies of the socialist and the bourgeois pictures of history - and from now on there will be two distinct historical cultures running side by side without ever really fusing - that people who have been brought up on the conventional version of history and know all about the Robespierrist Terror during the Great French Revolution, should find it an unfamiliar fact that the Terror of the government of Thiers executed, imprisoned or exiled more people - the number has been estimated at a hundred thousand - in that one week of the suppression of the [Paris] Commune [of 1871] than the revolutionary Terror of Robespierre had done in three years.

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.

It is certainly very hard to write about sex in English without making it unattractive.

They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.

Keep going; never stop; sit tight; Read something luminous at night.

I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.

The experience of mankind on the earth is always changing as man develops and has to deal with new combinations of elements; and the writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena. . . . With each such victory of the human intellect, whether in history, in philosophy or in poetry, we experience a deep satisfaction: we have been cured of some ache of disorder, relieved of some oppressive burden of uncomprehended events.

I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.

In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.

If I could only remember that the days were, not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.

The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagination.

In times of disorder and stress, the fanatics play a prominent role; in times of peace, the critics. Both are shot after the revolution.

Every work of art is a trick by which the artist manipulates appearances.

An acquaintance with the great works of art and thought is the only real insurance against the barbarism of the time.