A Quote by Van Wyck Brooks

People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding.

Van Wyck Brooks

Quote Topics

Knowledge Always Bent Breeding Caliber Good Good Breeding Own People Prowess Showing Small Superiority

Quote Author

Van Wyck Brooks
American - Critic
February 16, 1886 - May 2, 1963

People of small calibre are always carping. How affected so-and-so is! Don't you think he is silly? He was certainly quite mistaken about this or that. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or their prowess or good breeding.

Van Wyck Brooks

How delightful is the company of generous people, who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in the world about them. People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding. But magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And what is more, they find it everywhere.

Van Wyck Brooks

I'm always very interested in breeding. Raising cacti is breeding. My lotus plant collection is breeding. The insects are breeding.

Takashi Murakami

Good manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are good breeding; and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response to habitual stimuli, not by conveying information.

John Dewey

Good-breeding is the art of showing men, by external signs, the internal regard we have for them. It arises from good sense, improved by conversing with good company.

Cato the Younger

Variety shows didn't disappear; it was the caliber of the artists, the classic vaudevillians that have passed on. They are gone, so there's a different caliber performer that's come along that hasn't had the time to work in the small clubs and get the experience.

Flip Wilson

Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.

Thomas Carlyle

Fashion understands itself; good-breeding and personal superiority of whatever country readily fraternize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished themselves in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners.

Lord Chesterfield

The breeding programs for the bulls have improved significantly. The bulls are at a much higher caliber.

Chris LeDoux

Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [...] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.

George Eliot

Because knowledge is not for showing off. If I do good work, people should notice me.

Chetan Bhagat

I was fighting a small fight of my own which wasn't leading anywhere-but like a man with a bent spoon trying to dig through a cement wall I knew that a small fight was better than quitting: it kept the heart alive.

Charles Bukowski

Courtesy is breeding. Breeding is an excellent thing. Always remember that.

Lillian Hellman

The British were keen for 30 caliber guns, did not believe in daylight bombing. American experts said 30 caliber was not enough; we had to have 50 caliber, also said daylight bombing was right provided the planes attacked in formation, with 50 caliber guns.