Sinclair Lewis - Arrowsmith (1925)

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Men of measured merriment! Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment, the men with measured merriment, oh, damn their measured merriment, and DAMN their careful smiles!

Sinclair Lewis
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

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

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
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
The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious — he is so religious that he will not accept quarter truths, because they are an insult to his faith.

Sinclair Lewis
Pickerbaugh apparently believed that this research would take six weeks; Martin had hoped to do it in two years; and with the present interruptions it would require two hundred.

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
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
Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man.

Sinclair Lewis
It is not a snobbish rich-man's college, devoted to leisurely nonsense. It is the property of the people of the state, and what they want—or what they are told they want—is a mill to turn out men and women who will lead moral lives, play bridge, drive good cars, be enterprising in business, and occasionally mention books, though they are not expected to have time to read them. It is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its products rattle a little, they are beautifully standardized, with perfectly interchangeable parts.

Sinclair Lewis
He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican.

Sinclair Lewis
He preached to himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of being very doubtful, the gospel of not bawling gospels, the wisdom of admitting the probable ignorance of one's self and of everybody else, and the energetic acceleration of a Movement for going very slow.

Sinclair Lewis
You have curiosity and you are stubborn. You do not accept rules. Therefore I t'ink you will either make a very good scientist or a very bad one, and if you are bad enough, you will be popular with the rich ladies who rule this city, New York, and you can give lectures for a living or even become, if you get to be plausible enough, a college president. So anyway, it will be interesting.

Sinclair Lewis
He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.
He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a funny t'ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless—so much less cold than the Professional Optimists.

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
In the study of the profession to which he had looked forward all his life he found irritation and vacuity as well as serene wisdom; he saw no one clear path to Truth but a thousand paths to a thousand truths far-off and doubtful.

Sinclair Lewis
It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.

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

Sinclair Lewis
The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen.

Sinclair Lewis
He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.

Sinclair Lewis
He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance.

Sinclair Lewis
Gentlemen, the most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it. And the most important part of experimentation is not doing the experiment but making notes, very accurate quantitative notes — in ink. I am told that a great many clever people feel they can keep notes in their heads. I have often observed with pleasure that such persons do not have heads in which to keep their notes. This is very good, because thus the world never sees their results and science is not encumbered with them.

Sinclair Lewis