Katharine Fullerton Gerould Quotes

Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.

The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.

There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.

The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.

Each man's private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess.

No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.

There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love.

No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.

men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.

Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.

Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit.

democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical.

I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.

if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.

On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.

It is not permissible to lie merely to save one's face. But it is sometimes permissible to lie to save another person's face.

Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious?

What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new - yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp.

Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jefferson has really believed it.

The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

The great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind.

... the more we recruit from immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about culture, or even know what it is.