Top 50 Clifton Fadiman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.”

— Clifton Fadiman

Featured in: Travel Quotes, Country Quotes

2. “To feel at home, stay at home.”

— Clifton Fadiman

3. “Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.”

— Clifton Fadiman

4. “One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.”

— Clifton Fadiman

5. “We are all citizens of history.”

— Clifton Fadiman

6. “Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.”

— Clifton Fadiman

7. “When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.”

— Clifton Fadiman

8. “To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.”

— Clifton Fadiman

9. “To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.”

— Clifton Fadiman

10. “A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.”

— Clifton Fadiman

11. “Muhammad Ali: Superman Don’t need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don’t need no airplane, either.”

— Clifton Fadiman

12. “By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one.”

— Clifton Fadiman

13. “If food is the body of good living, wine is its soul.”

— Clifton Fadiman

14. “Cheese is milk’s leap towards immortality.”

— Clifton Fadiman

15. “Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.”

— Clifton Fadiman

16. “Liquor is not a necessity. It is a means of momentarily sidestepping necessity.”

— Clifton Fadiman

17. “The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.”

— Clifton Fadiman

18. “The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.”

— Clifton Fadiman

19. “A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.”

— Clifton Fadiman

20. “A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover.”

— Clifton Fadiman

21. “As between mileage and experience choose experience.”

— Clifton Fadiman

22. “A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover. The social emotions it generates are equidistant from the philatelist’s solitary gloating and the football fan’s gregarious hysteria.”

— Clifton Fadiman

23. “One’s first book, kiss, home run is always the best.”

— Clifton Fadiman

24. “I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.”

— Clifton Fadiman

25. “Dr. Seuss provided “ingenious and uniquely witty solutions to the standing problem of the juvenile fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole.”

— Clifton Fadiman

26. “Wine is poetry in a bottle.”

— Clifton Fadiman

27. “The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.”

— Clifton Fadiman

28. “A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality.”

— Clifton Fadiman

29. “Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.”

— Clifton Fadiman

Featured in: Reading Quotes

30. “The man who attracts luck carries with him the magnet of preparation.”

— Clifton Fadiman

31. “My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat.”

— Clifton Fadiman

32. “There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.”

— Clifton Fadiman

33. “There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning’s books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.”

— Clifton Fadiman

34. “Reading to small children is a specialty.”

— Clifton Fadiman

Featured in: Reading Quotes

35. “One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.”

— Clifton Fadiman

36. “Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.”

— Clifton Fadiman

37. “For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.”

— Clifton Fadiman

38. “My son is 7 years old. I am 54. It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community, I am stronger, I am more intelligent and I think I am better than he is. I don’t want to be a pal, I want to be a father.”

— Clifton Fadiman

39. “Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.”

— Clifton Fadiman

40. “The tantrums of cloth-headed celluloid idols are deemed fit for grown-up conversation, while silence settles over such a truly important matter as food.”

— Clifton Fadiman

41. “I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation.”

— Clifton Fadiman

42. “A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.”

— Clifton Fadiman

43. “Reading is not an operation performed on something inert but a relationship entered into with another vital being.”

— Clifton Fadiman

Featured in: Reading Quotes

44. “I found nothing really wrong with this autobiography except poor choice of subject.”

— Clifton Fadiman

45. “We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.”

— Clifton Fadiman

46. “We all die uneducated. But at least we will not feel quite so lost, so bewildered. We will have disenthralled ourselves from the merely contemporary. We will understand something – not much, but something – of our position in space and time.”

— Clifton Fadiman

47. “An aphorism can contain only as much wisdom as overstatement will permit.”

— Clifton Fadiman

48. “Being a child is in itself a profession.”

— Clifton Fadiman

49. “The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.”

— Clifton Fadiman

50. “The drinking of wine seems to me to have a moral edge over many pleasures and hobbies in that it promotes love of one’s neighbor.”

— Clifton Fadiman