Van Wyck Brooks Quotes

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me... by newspapers and the Bible.

Van Wyck Brooks

• Mind
• American
• English
• Bible
• Books

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Quotes to Explore

• It's great when a director like Cameron Crowe can take what you do and fit it into what he's doing. If someone's a fan of you already, they can take what you do and make it work for what they're doing. You don't know their vision, and you're thinking, 'How is this guy going to take what I do and make it work in this movie?'

  

  J. B. Smoove
  • Work
  • Great
  • Thinking

• Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

  

  Rachel Kushner
  • Art
  • Play
  • Politics

• Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

  

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
  • Game
  • Sweet
  • Friendship

• I have run two Olympic 'A' standard times over the past 12 months and with the time I ran at the African Championships last week I know my speed and fitness are constantly improving so that I will peak in time for the Olympics.

  

  Oscar Pistorius
  • Time
  • Past
  • Fitness

• Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

  

  W. H. Auden
  • Time
  • Happy
  • Interesting

• Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.

  

  Garrett Hardin
  • Power
  • Political
  • Financial

• I have never found out that there was in my family an artist or anyone interested in the arts or sciences, and I have never been sufficiently interested in my 'family tree' to bother. My father and mother had come to America on one of those great waves of immigration that followed persecution and pogroms in Czarist Russia and Poland.

  

  Jacob Epstein
  • Great
  • Family
  • America

• People are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

  

  Barney Frank
  • People
  • Innocence
  • Entitled

• I have spent a lot of time listening to people who are serving life sentences and getting to know them and the circumstances of their lives. I have never met anyone serving a long prison sentence who had anything close to what I could call a childhood; instead, the upbringings always - always - involve extreme situations of poverty and abuse.

  

  Rachel Kushner
  • People
  • Life
  • Time

• Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.

  

  Victor Hugo
  • Fall
  • Woman
  • Grace

• I look around my house, and everything except the kids and dogs was made in China. And I'm not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.

  

  P. J. O'Rourke
  • Kids
  • House
  • Small

• I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.

  

  Jackson Pollock
  • Painting
  • Canvas
  • Ever

• I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable.

  

  N. Scott Momaday
  • Land
  • Landscape
  • Isolation

• Any girl who likes watching movies would like to work in them and would want to do all of that. I'm also one of them. But people know me for badminton and love me for it. So I'd stick to it right now. But maybe after badminton, I'll think about it.

  

  Saina Nehwal
  • People
  • Work
  • Girl

• To me the definition of true masculinity – and femininity, too – is being able to lay in your own skin comfortably.

  

  Vincent D'Onofrio
  • True
  • Me
  • Femininity

• I'd probably describe my sense of humor as 'twisted,' I guess. It's not hard to make me laugh, especially when I'm surrounded by my close friends, especially my bandmates.

  

  Mac DeMarco
  • Friends
  • Humor
  • Laugh

• Mum's a worrier, she looked after everybody apart from herself - I think it runs in the family.

  

  Gail Porter
  • Family
  • She
  • Think

• I left for Petersburg in August, 1871 and stayed there until 1879.

  

  Carl Spitteler
  • Left
  • August
  • Stayed

• You'd think skiing wouldn't be strenuous - all you have to do, after all, is start at the top and let gravity pull you to the dessert bar in the lodge. But at those elevations, you'll find about as much oxygen as you'll find kindness from your children. It's like spending six hours holding your breath.

  

  W. Bruce Cameron
  • Children
  • Kindness
  • Skiing

• If you're feeling insecure and you need to feel special, the best place to go is somewhere foreign where people treat you as special because you're different.

  

  Kristin Scott Thomas
  • People
  • Different
  • Feeling

• Elected representatives are so embedded in the basic notion of what constitutes a democratic nation that it has become indistinguishable from any other form of democratic governance.

  

  Eduardo Paes

• The countless number of influential figures in American history who are of Caribbean heritage indicates the need to set aside a designated time to celebrate their contribution to our country.

  

  Eliot Engel
  • Time
  • Country
  • American

• For the wakeful one whose mind is quiet, whose thoughts are undisturbed, who has relinquished judgement and blame, there is no fear.

  

  Gautama Buddha
  • Mind
  • Thoughts
  • Blame

• The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me... by newspapers and the Bible.

  

  Van Wyck Brooks
  • Mind
  • American
  • English