What is to be got at to make the air sweet, the ground good under the feet, can only be got at by failure, trial, again and again and again failure.
—Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Failures, Mistakes
Interest in the lives of others, the high evaluation of these lives, what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself, the value he attributes to his own being?
—Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Acceptance, Realization, Awareness
I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.
—Sherwood Anderson
Work accomplished means little. It is in the past. What we all want is the glorious and living present.
—Sherwood Anderson
Topics: The Present
General Grant had a simple, childlike recipe for meeting life … “I am terribly afraid, but the other fellow is afraid, too”.
—Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.
—Sherwood Anderson
Topics: The Present, Life
I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.
—Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Simplicity, Simple Living
The whole object of education is, or should be, to develop mind. The mind should be a thing that works. It should be able to pass judgment on events as they arise, make decisions.
—Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Education, Mind
The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist’s imaginative life there is purpose. … Most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.
—Sherwood Anderson
In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.
—Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Truth
If a man doesn’t delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?
—Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Assurance, Confidence
It may be true of all relationships, not only between fathers and sons, but between men and women. Nothing seems fixed. Everything is always changing. We seem to have very little control over our emotional life.
—Sherwood Anderson
Topics: Emotions
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Raymond Chandler American Novelist
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Don DeLillo American Author
- Russell Hoban American Author
- John Irving American Novelist
- Dashiell Hammett American Crime Writer
- Joseph Heller American Novelist
- William Saroyan American Playwright, Novelist
- William Dean Howells American Writer, Critic
- Lionel Trilling American Critic
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