Booth Tarkington Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.

Booth Tarkington
Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy. The last term of the school-year is made of decades, not of weeks, and living through them is like waiting for the millennium.

Booth Tarkington
An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.

Booth Tarkington
One of the hardest conditions of boyhood is the almost continuous strain put upon the powers of invention by the constant and harassing necessity for explanations for every natural act.

Booth Tarkington
Christmas day is the children's, but the holidays are youth's dancing-time.

Booth Tarkington
Superciliousness is not safe after all, because a person who forms the habit of wearing it may some day find his lower lip grown permanently projected beyond the upper, so that he can't get it back, and must go through life looking like the King of Spain.

Booth Tarkington
The only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody.

Booth Tarkington
The only safe male rebuke to a scornful female is to stay away from her - especially if that is what she desires.

Booth Tarkington
This is a boy's lot: anything he does, anything whatever, may afterward turn out to have been a crime - he never knows. And punishment and clemency are alike inexplicable.

Booth Tarkington
The things that we have and that we think are so solid - they're like smoke, and time is like the sky that the smoke disappears into, nothing is left but the sky, and the sky keeps on being just the same forever.

Booth Tarkington
There aren't any old times. When times are gone they're not old, they're dead! There aren't any times but new times!

Booth Tarkington
Mothers see the angel in us because the angel is there. If it's shown to the mother, the son has got an angel to show, hasn't he? When a son cuts somebody's throat the mother only sees it's possible for a misguided angel to act like a devil - and she's entirely right about that!

Booth Tarkington
They were upon their great theme: "When I get to be a man!" Being human, though boys, they considered their present estate too commonplace to be dwelt upon. So, when the old men gather, they say: "When I was a boy!" It really is the land of nowadays that we never discover.

Booth Tarkington
Nobody has a good name in a bad mouth. Nobody has a good name in a silly mouth either.

Booth Tarkington
Men were just like sheep, and nothing was easier than for women to set up as shepherds and pen them up in a field.

Booth Tarkington
Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them.

Booth Tarkington
No doubt it is true that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repented than over all the saints who consistently remain holy, and the rare, sudden gentlenesses of arrogant people have infinitely more effect than the continual gentleness of gentle people. Arrogance turned gentle melts the heart.

Booth Tarkington
Some day the laws of glamour must be discovered, because they are so important that the world would be wiser now if Sir Isaac Newton had been hit on the head, not by an apple, but by a young lady.

Booth Tarkington