Top 28 Quotes & Sayings by Max Eastman

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Max Eastman.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet and a prominent political activist. Moving to New York City for graduate school, Eastman became involved with radical circles in Greenwich Village. He supported socialism and became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes. For several years, he edited The Masses. With his sister Crystal Eastman, he co-founded in 1917 The Liberator, a radical magazine of politics and the arts.

American - Author | January 4, 1883 - March 25, 1969

Source: Wikipedia

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

Max Eastman

I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while.

Max Eastman

A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.

Max Eastman

Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.

Max Eastman

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

Max Eastman

Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind.

Max Eastman

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Max Eastman

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Max Eastman

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.

Max Eastman

A smile is the universal welcome.

Max Eastman

Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.

Max Eastman

The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.

Max Eastman

Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.

Max Eastman

People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.

Max Eastman

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

Max Eastman

A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.

Max Eastman

The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force.

Max Eastman

If one were loyal to one's nation only because it was good and true ... one would not be loyal to any nation but to truth and goodness. The idea of patriotism would have no place either in our dictionaries or our lives.

Max Eastman

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke

Max Eastman

Living well is the best revenge.If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.

Max Eastman

Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.There is always a laugh in the utterly familiar.

Max Eastman

He [P.G.Wodehouse] is I believe, the only man living who speaks with equal fluency the American and English languages.

Max Eastman

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. And a tail is an awkward thing to laugh with, as you can see by the way they bend themselves half double in extreme hilarity trying to get that rear-end exuberance forward into the main scene of action. What puts man on a higher stage of evolution is that he has got his laugh on the right end.

Max Eastman

Laughter puts your brain, your central nervous system and your whole being into a state of free play.

Max Eastman

Patriotism is one of the unalterable facts of man's nature. It is a virtue if you like it, and a vice if you don't like it.

Max Eastman

There is truth in the high opinion that in so far as a man conforms, he ceases to exist.

Max Eastman

There is something self-defeating in the too-conscious pursuit of pleasure.

Max Eastman

Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind

Max Eastman