William Dean Howells Quotes & Sayings

People are born and married, and live and die, in the midst of an uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it. — William Dean Howells

The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you. — William Dean Howells

The wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment. — 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

I wonder why we hate the past so. — William Dean Howells

The swelling and towering omnibuses, the huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the impetuous hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony-carts, donkey-carts, hand-carts, and bicycles which fearlessly find their way amidst the turmoil, with foot-passengers winding in and out, and covering the sidewalks with their multitude, give the effect of a single monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the channel where it had run in the figure of a flood till you were tired of that metaphor. You are now a molecule of that vast organism. — William Dean Howells

New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay but prince or pauper, it's gay always ... Yes, gay is the word ... but frantic. I can't get used to it. They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New York. — William Dean Howells

It's very odd ... that some values should have this peculiarity of shrinking. You never hear of values in a picture shrinking; but rents, stocks, real estate
all those values shrink abominably. — William Dean Howells

It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this. New York has very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, it would be different. New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make or break a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine. The great mass of the readers are outside of New York and the rural districts are what we have got to go for. They don't read much in New York; they write and talk about what they've written. Don't you worry. — William Dean Howells

An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise. — William Dean Howells

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

She had conquered, but she had also necessarily lost much. Perhaps what she had lost was not worth keeping; but at any rate she had lost it. — William Dean Howells

Forest to their fields of corn and tobacco on the fertile slopes and rich bottom-lands. The — William Dean Howells

The action is best that secures the greatest happiness for the greatest number. — 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

I know, indeed, of nothing more subtly satisfying and cheering than a knowledge of the real good will and appreciation of others. Such happiness does not come with money, nor does it flow from fine physical state. It cannot be brought. But it is the keenest joy, after all; and the toiler's truest and best reward. — William Dean Howells

... in Altruria every one works with his hands, so that the hard work shall not all fall to any one class; and this manual labor of each is sufficient to keep the body in health, as well as to earn a living. After the three, hours' work, which constitutes a day's work with us, is done, the young people have all sorts of games and sports, and they carry them as late into life as the temperament of each demands. — William Dean Howells

It seems to me a proof of the small advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do. — William Dean Howells

If he was not commonplace, it was through nothing remarkable in his mind, which was simply clear and practical, but through some combination of qualities of the heart that made men trust him, and women call him sweet
a word of theirs which conveys otherwise indefinable excellences. — William Dean Howells

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

He had always said to himself that there could be no persistence of personality, of character, of identity, of consciousness, except through memory; yet here, to the last implication of temperament, they all persisted. The soul that was passing in its integrity through time without the helps, the crutches, of remembrance by which his own personality supported itself, why should not it pass so through eternity without that loss of identity which was equivalent to annihilation? — William Dean Howells

You'll find as you grow older that you weren't born such a great while ago after all. The time shortens up. — William Dean Howells

The novelist might be greater possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation, but for the most part they have been and are altogether noxious. — William Dean Howells

The disposition to give a cup of cold water to a disciple is a far nobler property than the finest intellect. Satan has a fine intellect, but not the image of God. — William Dean Howells

It was not a particularly sane spectacle, that impatience to be off to some place that lay not only in the distance, but also in the future - to which no line of road carries you with absolute certainty across an interval of time full of every imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to buy a ticket to Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrive there. Say that all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive? — William Dean Howells

See how today's achievement is only tomorrow's confusion;See how possession always cheapens the thing that was precious. — William Dean Howells

I am yours, for time and eternity
time and eternity. — 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

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

The stranger looked at his watch; he jumped to his feet. "Nine o'clock! Mrs. Braile, I'm ashamed. But you must blame your husband, partly. Good night, ma'am; good - Why, look here, Squire Braile!" he arrested himself in offering his hand. "How about the obscurity of the scene where Joe Smith founded his superstition, which bids fair to live right along with the other false religions? Was Leatherwood, Ohio, a narrower stage than Manchester, New York? And in point of time the two cults were only four years apart. — William Dean Howells

What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending. — William Dean Howells

I haven't done anything--yet. — 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

Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself. — William Dean Howells

Our theory of disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and novelist, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches us that this is false. The house of mourning is decorously darkened to the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing. Burst of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom, and the stricken survivors have their jest together, in which the thought of the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense, not crazier than many others, of sympathy and enjoyment beyond the silence, justifies the sunnier mood before sorrow rushes back, deploring and despairing, and make it all up again with the conventional fitness of things. — William Dean Howells

People naturally despise a dependant. — William Dean Howells

There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things. — William Dean Howells

We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world ... but I am more and more puzzled about it in the moral world. There its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatsoever. — William Dean Howells

If we like a man's dream, we call him a reformer; if we don't like his dream, we call him a crank. — William Dean Howells

And the characters are all invented as to their psychological evolution, though some are based upon those of real persons easily identifiable in that narrative. The drama is that of the actual events in its main development; but the vital incidents, or the vital uses of them, are the author's. At times he has enlarged them; at times he has paraphrased the accounts of the witnesses; in one instance he has frankly reproduced the words of the imposter as reported by one who heard Dylks's last address in — 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

Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the foot of the feudal system! — William Dean Howells

Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them
are ruinous! — 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

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

In Europe life is histrionic and dramatized, and in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere. — William Dean Howells

Every one is expected to look out for himself here. I fancy that there would be very little rising if men were expected to rise for the sake of others, in America. — William Dean Howells

How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us? — William Dean Howells

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

Tomorrow I shall be sixty-nine, but I do not seem to care. I did not start the affair, and I have not been consulted about it at any step. — William Dean Howells

The difficulty is to know conscience from self-interest. — William Dean Howells

Wisdom and goodness are twin-born, one heart must hold both sisters, never seen apart. — William Dean Howells

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

She liked the words; they satisfied her famine for phrases. — William Dean Howells

All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise. — William Dean Howells

Primitive societies without religion have never been found. — William Dean Howells

I don't know," said the papa. "We shall just have to keep on and see. Perhaps when they meet the Prince and Princess we shall find out. I don't suppose a boy would fall in love with a boy." "No," said the niece; "but he might want to go off with him and have fun, or something." "That's true," said the papa. "We've got to all watch out. — William Dean Howells

The conqueror is regarded with awe; the wise man commands our respect; but it is only the benevolent man that wins our affection. — 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

Yes, there's sense in that. But the suddenly rich are on a level with any of us nowadays. Money buys position at once. I don't say that it isn't all right. The world generally knows what it's about, and knows how to drive a bargain. I dare say that it makes the new rich pay too much. But there's no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age. It's the thing that chiefly strikes the imagination. The Englishmen who come here are more curious about the great new millionaires than about anyone else, and they respect them more. It's all very well. I don't complain of it. — William Dean Howells

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

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

If ever the public was betrayed by its press, it's ours. — William Dean Howells

It's astonishing how well the worse reason looks when you try to make it appear the better. — William Dean Howells

Out of the fragrant heart of bloom, The bobolinks are singing; Out of the fragrant heart of bloom The apple-tree whispers to the room, Why art thou but a nest of gloom While the bobolinks are singing? — 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

I dare say if you'd asked him plumply what he meant in regard to the young lady, he would have told you - if he knew.'
'Why, don't you think he does know, Bromfield?'
'I'm not at all sure he does. You women think that because a young man dangles after a girl, or girls, he's attached to them. It doesn't at all follow. He dangles because he must, and doesn't know what to do with his time, and because they seem to like it. I dare say that Tom has dangled a good deal in this instance because there was nobody else in town. — William Dean Howells

No, no. I understand that. And I quite agree with you. But you know I've always contended that the affections could be made to combine pleasure and profit. I wouldn't have a man marry for money,
that would be rather bad,
but I don't see why, when it comes to falling in love, a man shouldn't fall in love with a rich girl as easily as a poor one. Some of the rich girls are very nice, and I should — William Dean Howells

How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way! — 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

Some people stay longer in an hour than others do in a month. — William Dean Howells

Lord, for the erring thoughtNot into evil wrought:Lord, for the wicked willBetrayed and baffled still:For the heart from itself kept,Our thanksgiving accept. — William Dean Howells

I fancy you may tell the truth about yourself. But all of it? The black truth, which we all know ourselves in our hearts, or only the whity-brown truth of the pericardium, or the nice, whitened truth of the shirtfront? Even you [Mark Twain] won't tell the black heart's-truth. The man who could do it would be famed to the last day the sun shown upon. — William Dean Howells

I wish you to believe whatever you think is true, at any and every cost. — William Dean Howells