Louis Kronenberger Quotes - Page 2

In general, American social life constitutes an evasion of talking to people. Most Americans don't, in any vital sense, get together; they only do things together.

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all-which perhaps most explains the expert's sovereignty-of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.

Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness.

Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.

Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.

A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.

If it is the great delusion of moralists to suppose that all previous ages were less sinful than their own, then it is the great delusion of intellectuals to suppose that all previous ages were less sick.

The essence of the expert is that his field shall be very special and narrow: one of the ways in which he inspires confidence is to rigidly limit himself to the little toe; he would scarcely venture an off-the-record opinion on an infected little finger.

Ours is the country where, in order to sell your product, you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.

Temperament, like liberty, is important despite how many crimes are committed in its name.

Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.

Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized?

Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.

Humor simultaneously wounds and heals, indicts and pardons, diminishes and enlarges; it constitutes inner growth at the expense of outer gain, and those who possess and honestly practice it make themselves more through a willingness to make themselves less.

He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.

True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.

This is, i think, very much the Age of Anxiety, the age of the neurosis, because along with so much that weighs on our minds there is perhaps even more that grates on our nerves.

The materialistic idealism that governs American life, that on the one hand makes a chariot of every grocery wagon, and on the other a mere hitching post of every star, lets every man lead a very enticing double life.

A great maxim of personal responsibility and mature achievement: "Do it yourself" is now the enthroned cliche for being occupied with nonessentials.

It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.

One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism.

Having disciples is in the end like having children, only not with love but with self-love preeminent.

The moving van is a symbol of more than our restlessness, it is the most conclusive evidence possible of our progress.