William Dean Howells Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself.

William Dean Howells
Nothing is so hard to understand as that there are human beings in this world besides one's self and one's set.

William Dean Howells
Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

William Dean Howells
We live, but a world has passed away
With the years that perished to make us men.

William Dean Howells
And before you know me gone
Eternity and I are one.

William Dean Howells
The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested...

William Dean Howells
The life of Christ, it wasn't only in healing the sick and going about to do good; it was suffering for the sins of others. That's as great a mystery as the mystery of death. Why should there be such a principle in the world? But it's been felt, and more or less dumbly, blindly recognized ever since Calvary. If we love mankind, pity them, we even wish to suffer for them. That's what has created the religious orders in all times—the brotherhoods and sisterhoods that belong to our day as much as to the mediaeval past. That's what is driving a girl like Margaret Vance, who has everything that the world can offer her young beauty, on to the work of a Sister of Charity among the poor and the dying.

William Dean Howells
Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.

William Dean Howells
Lord, for the erring thought
Not into evil wrought:
Lord, for the wicked will
Betrayed and baffled still:
For the heart from itself kept,
Our thanksgiving accept.

William Dean Howells
It is the curse of prosperity that it takes work away from us, and shuts that door to hope and health of spirit.

William Dean Howells
Yes, what the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.

William Dean Howells
Do not trouble yourselves about standards or ideals; but try to be faithful and natural: remember that there is no greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth to your own knowledge of things; and keep on working, even if your work is not long remembered.

William Dean Howells
The wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment.

William Dean Howells
I am not sorry for having wrought in common, crude material so much; that is the right American stuff; and perhaps hereafter, when my din is done, if anyone is curious to know what that noise was, it will be found to have proceeded from a small insect which was scraping about on the surface of our life and trying to get into its meaning for the sake of the other insects larger or smaller. That is, such has been my unconscious work; consciously, I was always, as I still am, trying to fashion a piece of literature out of the life next at hand.

William Dean Howells
Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.

William Dean Howells
A friend knows how to allow for mere quantity in your talk, and only replies to the quality.

William Dean Howells
I do not know how it is that clergymen and physicians keep from telling their wives the secrets confided to them; perhaps they can trust their wives to find them out for themselves whenever they wish.

William Dean Howells
The wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and sorrow.

William Dean Howells
By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is ugly, and it is only the ugly that is universal.

William Dean Howells
Preach the blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our eight-inch guns.

William Dean Howells
We are creatures of the moment; we live from one little space to another, and only one interest at a time fills these.

William Dean Howells
The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

William Dean Howells
He has lived heroic poetry, and he can, therefore, afford to talk simple prose.
Of a speech by Booker T. Washington

William Dean Howells
He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence.

William Dean Howells
It is the still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom.

William Dean Howells
Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it cannot exclude Him; and in the degree that it ignores His spirit, modern literature is artistically inferior. In other words, all good literature is now Christmas literature.

William Dean Howells
A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it's too late to let her know that he sees it.

William Dean Howells
N artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty.

William Dean Howells
Is it worth while to observe that there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?

William Dean Howells
Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them are ruinous!

William Dean Howells