Top 27 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Van Doren

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet Mark Van Doren.

Last updated on December 23, 2024.

Mark Van Doren was an American poet, writer and critic. He was a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, Whittaker Chambers, and Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He was literary editor of The Nation, in New York City (1924–1928), and its film critic, 1935 to 1938.

American - Poet | June 13, 1894 - December 10, 1972

Source: Wikipedia

Wit is the only wall between us and the dark.

Mark Van Doren

Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth.

Mark Van Doren

The genius of the Marx Brothers is for parody. They never are themselves. They exist too abundantly to be content with being that - they must go on, by the rapidest of transitions, to being something else. Groucho, in my opinion the bright star among the three, is never anything but the thing he is at the moment pretending to be.

Mark Van Doren

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.

Mark Van Doren

When it aims to express a love of the world it refuses to conceal the many reasons why the world is hard to love, though we must love it because we have no other, and to fail to love it is not to exist at all.

Mark Van Doren

To fail to love is not to exist at all.

Mark Van Doren

Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.

Mark Van Doren

The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

Mark Van Doren

I love the fall. I love it because of the smells that you speak of; and also because things are dying, things that you don't have to take care of anymore, and the grass stops growing.

Mark Van Doren

There is one thing we can do, and the happiest of people are those who do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present.

Mark Van Doren

Weightless in water, swift as the wind, Subtle of purpose - a feather blown - I go with my oarsmen where they will, My beautiful body and theirs all one.

Mark Van Doren

It’s a curious thing. I suppose most people think of artists as impatient but I don’t know of any first-rate artist who hasn’t manifested in his career an appalling patience, a willingness to wait and to do his best now in the expectation that next year he will do better.

Mark Van Doren

Any piece of knowledge I acquire today has a value at this moment exactly proportional to my skill to deal with it. Tomorrow, when I know more, I recall that piece of knowledge and use it better.

Mark Van Doren

A classic is a book that remains in print

Mark Van Doren

Respect for the Truth is an acquired taste.

Mark Van Doren

There is no appeal from the ways of the world, which must continue on its own terms or take us all down with it into chaos and confusion.

Mark Van Doren

The connectedness of things is what the educator contemplates to the limit of his capacity. No human capacity is great enough to permit a vision of the world as simple, but if the educator does not aim at the vision no one else will, and the consequences are dire when no one does.

Mark Van Doren

An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure.

Mark Van Doren

Wisdom before experience is only words; wisdom after experience is of no avail.

Mark Van Doren

I have always had the greatest respect for students. There is nothing I hate more than condescension—the attitude that they are inferior to you. I always assume they have good minds.

Mark Van Doren

There are two statements about human beings that are true: that all human beings are alike, and that all are different. On those two facts all human wisdom is founded.

Mark Van Doren

The art of reading is the art of adopting the pace the author has set. Some books are fast and some are slow, but no book can be understood if it is taken at the wrong speed.

Mark Van Doren

The literature of the world has exerted its power by being translated.

Mark Van Doren

To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been: Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in.

Mark Van Doren

Our best chance for happiness is education.

Mark Van Doren

Memory performs the impossible for man by the strength of his divine arms; holds together past and present, beholding both, existing in both, abides in the flowing, and gives continuity and dignity to human life.

Mark Van Doren

The job of the poet is to render the world-to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

Mark Van Doren

Top 27 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Van Doren

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