Sinclair Lewis Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

A proper school should teach nothing but bookkeeping, agriculture, geometry, dead languages made deader by leaving out all the amusing literature, and the Hebrew Bible as interpreted by men superbly trained to ignore contradictions, men technically called "Fundamentalists".

Sinclair Lewis
Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

Sinclair Lewis
Rev. Mr. Monday, the Prophet of Punch, has shown that he is the world's greatest salesman of salvation, and that by efficient organization the overhead of spiritual regeneration may be kept down to an unprecedented rock-bottom basis. He has converted over two hundred thousand lost and priceless souls at an average cost of less than ten dollars a head.

Sinclair Lewis
Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't say you're attacking them to excuse your own infractions. Yes, I've heard that plea.... To word it differently, 'You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you must live up to it!'

Sinclair Lewis
It was not her eloquence but her healing of the sick which raised Sharon to such eminence that she promised to become the most renowned evangelist in America. People were tired of eloquence; and the whole evangelist business was limited, since even the most ardent were not likely to be saved more than three of four times. But they could be healed constantly, and of the same disease.

Sinclair Lewis
It is not known whether Martin ever completely accepted as a gentleman-scholar the Clay Tredgold who was devoted to everything about astronomy except studying it.

Sinclair Lewis
They've worked out elaborate charts classifying all intellectual occupations and interests, with the methods and materials and tools, and especially the goals—the aims, the ideals, the moral purposes—that are suited to each of them. Really tremendous! Why, a musician or an engineer, for example, could look at his chart and tell accurately whether he was progressing fast enough, at his age, and if not, just what his trouble was, and the remedy.

Sinclair Lewis
What had he learned?
Enough Hebrew and Greek to be able to crawl through the Bible by using lexicons—so that, like all his classmates once they were out of the seminary, he always read it in English. A good many of the more condemnatory texts of the Bible—rather less than the average Holy Roller carpenter-evangelist. The theory that India and Africa have woes because they are not Christianized, but that Christianized Bangor and Des Moines have woes because the devil, a being obviously more potent than omnipotent God, sneaks around counteracting the work of Baptist preachers.

Sinclair Lewis
An ugly woodshed that's there, right on the ground, is handsomer to me than a ten-story temple that isn't there.

Sinclair Lewis
He was still not at all certain that he was doing any good, aside from providing the drug of religious hope to timorous folk frightened of hell-fire and afraid to walk alone.

Sinclair Lewis
It has been calculated that ninety-three million women in all parts of the world have ruined their complexions, and therefore, their souls, by Pemberton's creams and lotions for saving the same; and that nearly three-tenths of the alcohol consumed in prohibition counties is obtained in Pemberton's tonics and blood-builders and women's specifics, the last being regarded by large farmers with beards as especially tasty and stimulating.

Sinclair Lewis
Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drug-store chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it is life.

Sinclair Lewis
If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.

Sinclair Lewis
To be a scientist — it is not just a different job so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good natural man.

Sinclair Lewis
Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera--or war or fiction.

Sinclair Lewis
I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever.

Sinclair Lewis
"The regularity of the rate at which the strepolysin disappears suggests that an equation may be found." "Then why did you not make the equation?" "Well — I don't know. I wasn't enough of a mathematician." "Then you should not have published till you knew your math!"

Sinclair Lewis
Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.

Sinclair Lewis
To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

Sinclair Lewis
Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics! I've heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I've never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.

Sinclair Lewis
Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.

Sinclair Lewis
The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths.

Sinclair Lewis
There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.

Sinclair Lewis
Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.

Sinclair Lewis
[The scientist] hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he is not too kindly to the anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerve to call themselves scientists!

Sinclair Lewis
Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life's dark clouds.

Sinclair Lewis
What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?

Sinclair Lewis
Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities. Now and then I have, for my books or myself, been somewhat warmly denounced -- there was one good pastor in California who upon reading my Elmer Gantry desired to lead a mob and lynch me, while another holy man in the state of Maine wondered if there was no respectable and righteous way of putting me in jail.

Sinclair Lewis
It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.

Sinclair Lewis
In everything was the spirit of children's play - not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.

Sinclair Lewis