Carl Van Doren quotes

I perceive that the race of men, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity. (Carl Van Doren)

Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to.

Carl Van Doren

It is obvious that no difficulty in the way of world government can match the danger of a world without it.

Carl Van Doren

The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.

Carl Van Doren

Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.

Carl Van Doren

IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.

Carl Van Doren

A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.

Carl Van Doren

Though he knows that knowledge is imperfect, he trusts it alone. If he takes, therefore, the less delight in metaphysics, he takes the more in physics.

Carl Van Doren

Whoever says he knows that immortality is a fact is merely hoping that it is.

Carl Van Doren

Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.

Carl Van Doren

The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies. (Carl Van Doren)

Guy Rivers, a conventional piece as regards the love affair which makes a part of the plot, is a tale of deadly strife between the laws of Georgia and a fiendish bandit.

Carl Van Doren

The most familiar quotations are the most likely to be misquoted. Some misquotations are still variable, some have settled down to false versions that have obscured the true ones. They have passed over from literature into speech.

Carl Van Doren

In fiction, too, after the death of Cooper the main tendency for nearly a generation was away from the conquest of new borders to the closer cultivation, east of the Mississippi, of ground already marked.

Carl Van Doren

There is no trustworthy evidence as to a god's absolute existence.

Carl Van Doren

The opponents of the Constitution declared that the larger states would disturb the United States by their powerful contentions; the supporters replied that those contentions were sure to disturb the continent if the larger states were not united, much less sure to do it if they were united and so could be expected to arrive at peaceable agreements. The opponents of the Constitution were convinced that the people of the individual states could be protected only by their states armed with full, or at least substantial sovereignty. The supporters of the Constitution knew that conflicting sovereignties had been the causes of most wars, in which the people have regularly suffered. The opponents of the Constitution in 1787 could talk only of the difficulties of forming a new government The supporters of the Constitution aware of the dangers facing the Confederation, demanded that a new government be attempted, no matter what the difficulties.

Carl Van Doren

Neither creator nor critic can make himself universal by barely taking thought about it. He is what he lives. The measure of the creator is the amount of life he puts Into his work. The measure of the critic is the amount of life he finds there.

Carl Van Doren