I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems.
Source: The Books in My Life (1998), p. 188
“An aristocrat in morals as in mind.”
About Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship (1930), p. 130.
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Owen Wister 5
American writer 1860–1938Related quotes
“Two Types of American Individualism,” The Modern Age, Spring 1963, p. 127.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)
Source: Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins (2007), Ch. 2, p. 38
Context: These men — Yeats, James Stephens, and the rest — had aristocratic minds. For them, the world was not fragmented. An idea did not suddenly grow … all alone and separate. For them, all things had long family trees. They saw nothing shameful or silly in myths and fairy stories, nor did they shovel them out of sight and some cupboard marked "Only For Children." They were always willing to concede that there was more things in heaven and earth than philosophy dreamed of. They allowed for the unknown. And, as you can imagine, I took great heart from this. It was Æ who showed me how to look and learn from one's own writing. "Popkins" he said once — he always called her just plain Popkins, whether deliberately mistaking the name or not I never knew. His humor was always subtle — "Popkins had she lived in another age, in the old times to which she certainly belongs, she would undoubtedly have had long golden tresses, a wreath of flowers in one hand, and perhaps a spear in the other. Her eyes would have been like the sea, her nose comely, and on her feet winged sandals. But, this age being the Kali Yuga, as the Indus call it — in our terms, the Iron Age — she comes in habiliments suited to it."
“Morality is the weakness of the mind.”
Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 46
“To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), pp. 30-31
Dean Acheson, former clerk to Justice Brandeis, after Brandeis’s death in 1941.