Louis Kronenberger Quotes

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

In the history of mankind, fanaticism has caused more harm than vice.

The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.

Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.

On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit. Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.

Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.

The fascinating necessarily tends to call a certain attention to itself; the interesting need not. An evening spent with a fascinating person leaves vivid memories; one spent with interesting people has merely a sort of bouquet.

In art, there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts.

For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance.

Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.

Doubtless a good general rule for close friendships, where confidences are freely exchanged, is that what one is not informed about, one may not inquire about.

The American Way is so restlessly creative as to be essentially destructive; the American Way is to carry common sense itself almost to the point of madness.

Coyness is a rather comically pathetic fault, a miscalculation in which, by trying to veil the ego, we let it appear stark naked.

For tens of millions of people [television] has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.

On any morning these days whole segments of the population wake up to find themselves famous, while, to keep matters shipshape, whole contingents of celebrities wake up to find themselves forgotten.

It is disgusting to pick your teeth; what is vulgar is to use a gold toothpick.