Bernard DeVoto Quotes & Sayings

You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. — Bernard DeVoto

The water of life was given to us to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger than without its vision there is any evidence we are. — Bernard DeVoto

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. When you reach the line which marks that drop - for convenience, the one hundredth meridian - you have reached the West. — Bernard DeVoto

The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire. — Bernard DeVoto

The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act. — Bernard DeVoto

The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it. — Bernard DeVoto

Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate. — Bernard DeVoto

The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn. — Bernard DeVoto

It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and blood. — Bernard DeVoto

The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains. — Bernard DeVoto

The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it. — Bernard DeVoto

The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart, the day was not bad, the season has not been bad, there is sense and even promise in going on. — Bernard DeVoto

The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest lived. — Bernard DeVoto

Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which the worst by far is rum. Nevertheless, we have improved man's lot and enriched his civilization with rye, bourbon and the Martini cocktail. In all history has any other nation done so much? — Bernard DeVoto

One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification. The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens. — Bernard DeVoto

Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows. — Bernard DeVoto

A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself. — Bernard DeVoto

Art is man determined to die sane. — Bernard DeVoto

When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn. The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain. — Bernard DeVoto

History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance. — Bernard DeVoto

Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best. — Bernard DeVoto

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals. — Bernard DeVoto

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom. — Bernard DeVoto

Between the amateur and the professional ... there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization ... A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom. — Bernard DeVoto

New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end ... It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America. — Bernard DeVoto

The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole. — Bernard DeVoto

This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affectations glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn. — Bernard DeVoto

California was almost entirely a dream, a dream vague but deep in the minds of a westering people. — Bernard DeVoto