Bernard DeVoto famous quotes

03-25-2025

This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affectations glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Believe #Shadow #Watches
One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification. The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Impact #Citizens #Inheritance
The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Math #Mind #Doe
You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Kissing #Martini #Refrigerators
Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization. . . . A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Wisdom #Airplane #Player
When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn. The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Believe #Heart #Pulse
The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#People #Empires #West
When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Occupation #Cocktails #Evening
The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Individuality #Sacred #Trouble
The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Trouble #Reason #Refuse
The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Knowledge #Dawn
New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. . . . It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Life #Destiny #Civilization
You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest-lived.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Life #Kissing #Earth
The water of life was given to us to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger than without its vision there is any evidence we are.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Life #Men #Water
The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart, the day was not bad, the season has not been bad, there is sense and even promise in going on.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Wall #Heart #Promise
Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which the worst by far is rum. Nevertheless, we have improved man's lot and enriched his civilization with rye, bourbon and the Martini cocktail. In all history has any other nation done so much?
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Past #Men #Civilization
The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Writing #Paper #May
It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and blood.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Fall #Swans #Curves
Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Stupid #Race #Government
History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#Historical #Chance #Determinism
Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
-- Bernard DeVoto

#People #Onions #Done

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