Quotes from Louis Kronenberger

Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.

Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment.

Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.

We might define an eccentric as a man who is law unto himself, and a crank as one who having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others.

Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.

This is, i think, very much the Age of Anxiety, the age of the neurosis, because along with so much that weighs on our minds there is perhaps even more that grates on our nerves.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

In art, there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts.

Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

Ours is the country where, in order to sell your product, you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.

He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.

The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.

It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing. They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty. Louis Kronenberger

Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well.