Louis Kronenberger Quotes

Having disciples is in the end like having children, only not with love but with self-love preeminent.

Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.

We might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others.

The fascinating necessarily tends to call a certain attention to itself; the interesting need not. An evening spent with a fascinating person leaves vivid memories; one spent with interesting people has merely a sort of bouquet.

London ... remains a man's city where New York is chiefly a woman's. London has whole streets that cater to men's wants. It has its great solid phalanx of fortress clubs.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

A great maxim of personal responsibility and mature achievement: "Do it yourself" is now the enthroned cliche for being occupied with nonessentials.

Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.

The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy.

The materialistic idealism that governs American life, that on the one hand makes a chariot of every grocery wagon, and on the other a mere hitching post of every star, lets every man lead a very enticing double life.

Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.

Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

The moving van is a symbol of more than our restlessness, it is the most conclusive evidence possible of our progress.

Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.

The essence of the expert is that his field shall be very special and narrow: one of the ways in which he inspires confidence is to rigidly limit himself to the little toe; he would scarcely venture an off-the-record opinion on an infected little finger.

The technique of winning is so shoddy, the terms of winning are so ignoble, the tenure of winning is so brief; and the specter of the has-been-a shameful rather than a pitiable sight today-brings a sudden chill even to our sunlit moments.

For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance.

Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.

In art, there are tears that do lie too deep for thought.

Doubtless a good general rule for close friendships, where confidences are freely exchanged, is that what one is not informed about, one may not inquire about.

We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.

She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.

Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized?

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

Along with being forever on the move, one is forever in a hurry, leaving things inadvertently behind-friend or fishing tackle, old raincoat or old allegiance.

Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.

The life of sense begins by assuming that we can only fitfully live the life of reason.

On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit ... Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well.

One must never judge the writer by the man; but one may fairly judge the man by the writer.

From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.

The American Way is so restlessly creative as to be essentially destructive; the American Way is to carry common sense itself almost to the point of madness.

The thrust of ambition is, and always has been, great, but among the bright-eyed it had once a more adventurous and individualistic air, a much more bracing rivalry.

Coyness is a rather comically pathetic fault, a miscalculation in which, by trying to veil the ego, we let it appear stark naked.

Humor simultaneously wounds and heals, indicts and pardons, diminishes and enlarges; it constitutes inner growth at the expense of outer gain, and those who possess and honestly practice it make themselves more through a willingness to make themselves less.

A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.