Making the world safe for hypocrisy.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: The Military, Army, Navy
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Vanity, Loneliness
Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Death, Dying
If a man has talent and can’t use it, he’s failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.
—Thomas Wolfe
This is the artist, then—life’s hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty’s miser, glory’s slave.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Art
It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don’t put psychotics in high places and we’ve got the problem solved.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Leadership
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Eating, Cooking
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become un interested in money, compliments, or publicity.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Success
All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Age
Most of the time we think we’re sick it’s all in the mind.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Health, Optimism, Positive Attitudes
The modern picture of the artist began to form: The poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn’t see, to be high, live low, stay young forever—in short, to be the bohemian.
—Thomas Wolfe
Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Solitude
So, then, to every man his chance—to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining golden opportunity—to every man his right to live, to work, to be himself, to become whatever his manhood and his vision can combine to make him—this, seeker, is the promise of America.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Opportunities
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Writers, Books, Reading
If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Talents, Work, Failures, Mistakes, Abilities, Appropriateness, Aptness, Success
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Culture
One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: City Life, Cities
In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Sleep
Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America—that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Home
At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being—the reward he seeks—the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: The Artist
If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Liberalism
There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of the spirit.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Spirituality, Spirit
A cult is a religion with no political power.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Religion
The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art
We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Time Management, Time
Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Architecture
Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.
—Thomas Wolfe
Topics: Criticism, Critics
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Raymond Chandler American Novelist
- Lionel Trilling American Critic
- Ellery Queen American Crime Fiction Authors
- Lloyd Alexander American Writer
- Owen Wister American Novelist
- Walker Percy American Novelist
- Wendell Berry American Author, Environmentalist
- Ralph Ellison American Novelist
- John Dos Passos American Novelist, Artist
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