John Van Dyke Quotes

Wisdom: "Oh, fantastic. We've got an army made up of fairies and Beatles, and we're fighting H. G. Wells' martians and bloody Jack the Rippers. Who's next? Dick Van Dyke? Mr Bean? John Cleese and his dead parrot?

Loving isn't merging, surrendering, uniting with the other. Rather, it's a kind of solitude; of profound aloneness. It induces you to mature and become whole for the sake of your beloved ... to truly love another, you must first wholly love yourself. Love therefore exacts the most demanding claim of all; it both chooses you and pursues you, and reaches out, as if over vast distances, to call and draw you into your now and future self." -- John VanDyke Wilmerding, ideas put forth inspired by ('after') Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet

To speak of sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense- the power to enjoy through the eye, and the ear, and the imagination- is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the world would admit it.

Light and air — what means wherewith to conjure up illusions and deceive the senses!

Ambassador and poet Henry Van Dyke observed, “There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher.

The story of a man's life, especially when it is told by the man himself, should not be interrupted by the hecklings of an editor.

It is our fancy for things ancient, more than for things beautiful, that induces us to lift marble mantels from Venetian palaces and to place them in Fifth Avenue houses,” writer John Van Dyke grumbled in 1909, reflecting on the Astor-led impulse of aping European taste. “To hang our walls with tapestries from France and pictures from Italy and Holland, to cover our floors with Dagestan rugs, and to put in our drawing-rooms worm-eaten chairs from Paris and Nuremberg. Their inappropriateness in their new western setting is glazed over by the statement that they are ‘very old’—a statement which might, with equal pertinence if less interest, be made about any pudding-stone from the neighboring hills.

C. M. Doughty—Travels in Arabia Deserta—who almost never came back. A few Americans have tried to understand the desert: Mary Austin in her book Land of Little Rain, John C. Van Dyke in an unjustly forgotten book The Desert, Joseph Wood Krutch with The Voice of the Desert, the contemporary novelists Paul Bowles and William Eastlake in part of their work (but only in an incidental way), and such obscure figures as the lad Everett Reuss, author of On Desert Trails, who disappeared at the age of twenty-six into the canyon