The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.
SINCLAIR LEWISGod has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.”
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One quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
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It is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs.
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Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.
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Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse.
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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
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To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.
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Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth.
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If travel were so inspiring and informing a business … then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.
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We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!
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Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays ’em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera–or war or fiction.
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Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies.
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Most of us who work — or want to work — will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.
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I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity
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People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
SINCLAIR LEWIS