Top 107 Quotes & Sayings by Sinclair Lewis - Page 2

I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.

Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities. Now and then I have, for my books or myself, been somewhat warmly denounced -- there was one good pastor in California who upon reading my Elmer Gantry desired to lead a mob and lynch me, while another holy man in the state of Maine wondered if there was no respectable and righteous way of putting me in jail.

I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity

It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.

On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.

Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.

Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.

Indians, of course, have no "theology," and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.

Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.

You've been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General-just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns-'fess up! With your great experience, don't you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps-just maybe-when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes, so that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne'er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths.

She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.

The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.

When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, 'tain't any laughing matter!

Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.

There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn't a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me - I actually took my teachers seriously!

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.

That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.

Do you think it's so snobbish, to want to see something besides one's fellow citizens abroad?

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial cost, it's the humidity.

So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.

The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called "patriotism" and "love of sport."

Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.

Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.

What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?

We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.

A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.

He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.

There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don't wish to do.

A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.

The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires—to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty. ... He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected. —chapter 8

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.

His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.

If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.