One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
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The water of life was given to us to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger than without its vision there is any evidence we are.
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A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.
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Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows.
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The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
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The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart, the day was not bad, the season has not been bad, there is sense and even promise in going on.
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Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
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The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
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It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America.
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The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
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The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
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New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. . . .
BERNARD DEVOTO








