Louis Kronenberger Quotes

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

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.

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

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

One must never judge the writer by the man; but one may fairly judge the man by the writer.

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.

Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.

The truly ambitious are always as busy on the landings as they are breathless on the stairs.

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.

The life of sense begins by assuming that we can only fitfully live the life of reason.

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

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

Someone who gossips well has a reputation for being good company or even a wit, never for being a gossip.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

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

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

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.

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

Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.

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 our age is all signposts and no destination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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