Sinclair Lewis Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

Once she kidnapped me and drug me to the Methodist Church. I goes in, pious as Widow Bogart, and sits still and never cracks a smile while the preacher is favoring us with his misinformation on evolution. But afterwards, when the old stalwarts were pumphandling everybody at the door and calling 'em 'Brother' and 'Sister,' they let me sail right by with nary a clinch.

Sinclair Lewis
"I wonder if you can understand the 'fun' of making a beautiful thing, the pride and satisfaction of it, and the holiness!" The company glanced doubtfully at one another. In Gopher Prairie it is not good form to be holy except at church, between ten-thirty and twelve on Sunday.

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
Good sense from a child was not necessarily contemptible beside foolishness from a grown-up.

Sinclair Lewis
He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.

Sinclair Lewis
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
They were newly rich contractors who, having bought houses, motors, hand-painted pictures, and gentlemanliness, were now buying a refined ready-made philosophy. It had been a tossup with them whether to buy New Thought, Christian Science, or a good standard high-church model of Episcopalianism.

Sinclair Lewis
Now we got a lawyer, we got civilization, which I understand to mean that a man has a chance to get rich without working.

Sinclair Lewis
There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.

Sinclair Lewis
I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts.

Sinclair Lewis
Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man.

Sinclair Lewis
Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first sight the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.

Sinclair Lewis
Mr. Blingham, and may he fry in his own cooking-oil, was assistant treasurer of the Flaver-Saver Company.

Sinclair Lewis
He had unhappily noticed at the mission that when he had most hotly prayed, it had been a way of escaping a decision, of frivolously passing the lot to God.

Sinclair Lewis
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
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Sinclair Lewis
He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.

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

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
Slow yellow river flowing, willows that gesture in tepid August airs, and four children playing at greatness, as, doubtless, great men themselves must play.

Sinclair Lewis
He heard them whispering—whispering... The independence seeped out of him and he walked the streets alone, afraid of men's cynical eyes and the incessant hiss of whispering.

Sinclair Lewis
His reasoning had been introverted, turned from an examination of men as mammals and devoted to a sorrow that sinful and aching souls should not more readily seek the security of a mystic process known as Conviction, Repentance, and Salvation, which he was assured by the noblest and most literate men he had ever known, was guaranteed to cure all woe. His own experience did not absolutely confirm this.

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

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
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