Max Eastman Quotations

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.

Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.

The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.

A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.

Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind

I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke

Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. What puts man in a higher state of evolution is that he has got his laugh on the right end.

Chemical stimulation blunted the edge of Edna's otherwise so carefully cherished genius

Patriotism is one of the unalterable facts of man's nature. It is a virtue if you like it, and a vice if you don't like it.

Living well is the best revenge.If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. What puts man in a higher state of evolution is that he has got his laugh on the right end.

Laughter puts your brain, your central nervous system and your whole being into a state of free play.

He [P.G.Wodehouse] is I believe, the only man living who speaks with equal fluency the American and English languages.

The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force.

If one were loyal to one's nation only because it was good and true ... one would not be loyal to any nation but to truth and goodness. The idea of patriotism would have no place either in our dictionaries or our lives.

Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.There is always a laugh in the utterly familiar.

There is truth in the high opinion that in so far as a man conforms, he ceases to exist.

There is something self-defeating in the too-conscious pursuit of pleasure.

A smile is the universal welcome.