Edmund Wilson famous quotes

No two persons ever read the same book.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Inspirational #Book #Reading

There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Money #Income #Adequate

I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Hate #Paper #Fool

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Fall #Hands #Insult

Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Real #Genius #Moral

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Imagination #Possibility #Humans

Every work of art is a trick by which the artist manipulates appearances.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Art #Appearance #Tricks

They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Special #Ordinary #Politeness

The great mistake about Europe is taking the countries seriously and letting them quarrel and drop bombs on one another.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Country #Mistake #Europe

One didn't really believe till one saw it demonstrated that giving oneself up completely to art, to emotion, to enjoyment, without planning for the future or counting the cost, produced dreadful disabilities and bankruptcies later.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Art #Believe #Giving

I really can't stand any more to pay for a burst of animation when someone comes in for drinks with a depressed and low-keyed next day, in which I have to go around on my hands and knees.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Hands #Pay #Knees

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Kind #Poet

Education, the last hope of the liberal in all periods.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Lasts #Periods

I think with my right hand.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Thinking #Hands

Old-fogyism is comfortably closing in.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Age #Aging #Closing

In times of disorder and stress, the fanatics play a prominent role; in times of peace, the critics. Both are shot after the revolution.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Stress #Play #Roles

If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Dog #Never Change #Scenery

The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagination.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Imagination #Vision #Artistic

Keep going; never stop; sit tight; Read something luminous at night.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Night #Keep Going

The Jew lends himself easily to Communism because it enables him to devote himself to a high cause, involving all of humanity, characteristics which are natural to him as a Jew.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Humanity #Causes #Communism

His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Life #Style #Orchestra

The only thing that we can really make is our work, and deliberate work of the mind, imagination and hand, done, as Nietzsche said, ‘notwithstanding,’ in the long run remakes the world.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Running #Hands #Long

All Hollywood corrupts; and absolute Hollywood corrupts absolutely.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Hollywood

In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Book

If I could only remember that the days were not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Life #Heart #Fire

It is certainly very hard to write about sex in English without making it unattractive.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Sex #Writing #Unattractive

The most immoral and disgraceful and dangerous thing that anybody can do in the arts is knowingly to feed back to the public its own ignorance and cheap tastes.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Art #Ignorance #Taste

From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation
-- Edmund Wilson

#Real #Europe #Cities

Only the curious will learn and only the resolute will overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Inspirational #Education #Learning

I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Men #Ideas #Drink

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.
-- Edmund Wilson

#Marxism #Opium