Sinclair Lewis: Trending quotes

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Sinclair Lewis: 272 quotes3 likes

“The content of his theology was that there was a supreme being who had tried to make us perfect, but presumably had failed; that if one was a Good Man he would go to a place called Heaven…. 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; and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good — kept him in touch with higher things.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

~ Ch. 16
Babbitt (1922)

“"Even if some details of dogma aren't true—or even all of 'em—think what a consolation religion and the church are to weak humanity!"
"Are they? I wonder! Don't cheerful agnostics, who know they are going to die dead, worry much less than good Baptists, who worry lest their sons and cousins and sweethearts fail to get into the Baptist heaven—or what is even worse, who wonder if they may not have guessed wrong—if God may not be a Catholic, maybe, or a Mormon or Seventh-day Adventist instead of a Baptist, and then they'll go to hell themselves. Consolation? No!"”

Sinclair Lewis book Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

“It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“She did her work with the thoroughness of mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 18

“Everything seemed confused and contradictory, and he longed for one clear command from a divine martinet.”

Sinclair Lewis

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 7

“As they talked around the fire in the sitting-room, he was embarrassed by the nakedness of their piety.”

Sinclair Lewis

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 22

“It was of no use. That particular sort of coward and evader he was not, and he lay abed facing all his sins, all his slacknesses, and the merited punishment by a just and angry God.”

Sinclair Lewis

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 5

“Mostly the adult Indians did not wish their children to learn these arts from the emissaries of what they astonishingly considered an alien, false and hostile God.”

Sinclair Lewis

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 21

“He preached to himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of being very doubtful, the gospel of not bawling gospels, the wisdom of admitting the probable ignorance of one's self and of everybody else, and the energetic acceleration of a Movement for going very slow.”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch 21

“I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn't a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me—I actually took my teachers seriously!”

Sinclair Lewis book Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

“So debated Doremus, like some hundreds of thousands of other craftsmen, teachers, lawyers, what-not, in some dozens of countries under a dictatorship, who were aware enough to resent the tyranny, conscientious enough not to take its bribes cynically, yet not so abnormally courageous as to go willingly to exile or dungeon or chopping-block—particularly when they "had wives and families to support."”

Sinclair Lewis book It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here (1935)

“Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.”

Sinclair Lewis book The Job

The Job (1917)

“He had never been sure but that there might be something to the doctrines he had preached as an evangelist. Perhaps God really had dictated every word of the Bible. Perhaps there really was a hell of burning sulphur. Perhaps the Holy Ghost really was hovering around watching him and reporting. But he knew with serenity that all of his New Thoughts, his theosophical utterances, were pure and uncontaminated bunk. No one could deny his theories because none of his theories meant anything. It did not matter what he said, so long as he kept them listening; and he enjoyed the buoyancy of power as he bespelled his classes with long, involved, fruity sentences rhapsodic as perfume advertisements.”

Sinclair Lewis book Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

“The dinner was the best style of women's-magazine art, whereby the salad was served in hollowed apples, and everything but the invincible fried chicken resembled something else.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 8

“Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be 'intellectual' or 'artistic' or, in their own word, to be 'highbrow,' is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“Men who had made five thousand, year before last, and ten thousand last year, were urging on nerve-yelping bodies and parched brains so that they might make twenty thousand this year; and the men who had broken down immediately after making their twenty thousand dollars were hustling to catch trains, to hustle through the vacations which the hustling doctors had ordered.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 12

“Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.”

Sinclair Lewis

Letter declining the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith

“The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen.”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 1, First lines

“He had enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all mechanical devices. They were his symbols of truth and beauty. Regarding each new intricate mechanism—metal lathe, two-jet carburetor, machine gun, oxyacetylene welder—he learned one good realistic-sounding phrase, and used it over and over, with a delightful feeling of being technical and initiated.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 6

“It is not a snobbish rich-man's college, devoted to leisurely nonsense. It is the property of the people of the state, and what they want—or what they are told they want—is a mill to turn out men and women who will lead moral lives, play bridge, drive good cars, be enterprising in business, and occasionally mention books, though they are not expected to have time to read them. It is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its products rattle a little, they are beautifully standardized, with perfectly interchangeable parts.”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch 2