Louis Kronenberger Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

Louis Kronenberger
Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

Louis Kronenberger
It's the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

Louis Kronenberger
The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.

Louis Kronenberger
Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.

Louis Kronenberger
The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned into advertising copy.

Louis Kronenberger
Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.

Louis Kronenberger
It is disgusting to pick your teeth; what is vulgar is to use a gold toothpick.

Louis Kronenberger
Having disciples is in the end like having children, only not with love but with self-love preeminent.

Louis Kronenberger
She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.

Louis Kronenberger
Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has actually become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its nonmystical methods; above all... of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.

Louis Kronenberger
In the history of thought and culture the dark nights have perhaps in some ways cost mankind less grief than the false dawns, the prison houses in which hope persists less grief than the promised lands where hope expires.

Louis Kronenberger
He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.

Louis Kronenberger
Along with being forever on the move, one is forever in a hurry, leaving things inadvertently behind-friend or fishing tackle, old raincoat or old allegiance.

Louis Kronenberger
We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.

Louis Kronenberger
Coyness is a rather comically pathetic fault, a miscalculation in which, by trying to veil the ego, we let it appear stark naked.

Louis Kronenberger
Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.

Louis Kronenberger
From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.

Louis Kronenberger
Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

Louis Kronenberger
For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance.

Louis Kronenberger
True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would-be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.

Louis Kronenberger
Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfilment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.

Louis Kronenberger
On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit […] Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

Louis Kronenberger
Most people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing. They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety. They want answers that are, in effect, escapes.

Louis Kronenberger
One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well.

Louis Kronenberger
The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy.

Louis Kronenberger
Humor simultaneously wounds and heals, indicts and pardons, diminishes and enlarges; it constitutes inner growth at the expense of outer gain, and those who possess and honestly practice it make themselves more through a willingness to make themselves less.

Louis Kronenberger
There are, of course, good happy endings as well as bad ones, but surely they are of a kind that in some way expresses happiness rather than glibly promises it.

Louis Kronenberger
Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.

Louis Kronenberger
In art there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts.

Louis Kronenberger