Top 60 Louis Kronenberger Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Many people today don’t want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.”

— Louis Kronenberger

2. “Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.”

— Louis Kronenberger

3. “The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.”

— Louis Kronenberger

4. “It is the gossip columnist’s business to write about what is none of his business.”

— Louis Kronenberger

5. “Coyness is a rather comically pathetic fault, a miscalculation in which, by trying to veil the ego, we let it appear stark naked.”

— Louis Kronenberger

6. “Along with being forever on the move, one is forever in a hurry, leaving things inadvertently behind-friend or fishing tackle, old raincoat or old allegiance.”

— Louis Kronenberger

7. “For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance.”

— Louis Kronenberger

8. “She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.”

— Louis Kronenberger

9. “A great maxim of personal responsibility and mature achievement: “Do it yourself” is now the enthroned cliche for being occupied with nonessentials.”

— Louis Kronenberger

10. “The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being; the American wants to be considered a good guy.”

— Louis Kronenberger

11. “The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn’t matter.”

— Louis Kronenberger

12. “A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.”

— Louis Kronenberger

13. “We might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others.”

— Louis Kronenberger

14. “In art, there are tears that do lie too deep for thought.”

— Louis Kronenberger

15. “Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.”

— Louis Kronenberger

16. “Humor simultaneously wounds and heals, indicts and pardons, diminishes and enlarges; it constitutes inner growth at the expense of outer gain, and those who possess and honestly practice it make themselves more through a willingness to make themselves less.”

— Louis Kronenberger

17. “With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.”

— Louis Kronenberger

18. “The thrust of ambition is, and always has been, great, but among the bright-eyed it had once a more adventurous and individualistic air, a much more bracing rivalry.”

— Louis Kronenberger

19. “Today’s competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one’s social life, one’s solitude, one’s sleep, one’s sleeplessness.”

— Louis Kronenberger

20. “The fascinating necessarily tends to call a certain attention to itself; the interesting need not. An evening spent with a fascinating person leaves vivid memories; one spent with interesting people has merely a sort of bouquet.”

— Louis Kronenberger

21. “There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.”

— Louis Kronenberger

22. “Ours is the country where, in order to sell your product, you don’t so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.”

— Louis Kronenberger

23. “In general, American social life constitutes an evasion of talking to people. Most Americans don’t, in any vital sense, get together; they only do things together.”

— Louis Kronenberger

24. “In the history of mankind, fanaticism has caused more harm than vice.”

— Louis Kronenberger

25. “Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.”

— Louis Kronenberger

26. “We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.”

— Louis Kronenberger

27. “Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment’s weapon.”

— Louis Kronenberger

28. “The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.”

— Louis Kronenberger

29. “It is disgusting to pick your teeth; what is vulgar is to use a gold toothpick.”

— Louis Kronenberger

30. “Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.”

— Louis Kronenberger

31. “The materialistic idealism that governs American life, that on the one hand makes a chariot of every grocery wagon, and on the other a mere hitching post of every star, lets every man lead a very enticing double life.”

— Louis Kronenberger

32. “Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.”

— Louis Kronenberger

33. “True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.”

— Louis Kronenberger

34. “The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.”

— Louis Kronenberger

35. “The technique of winning is so shoddy, the terms of winning are so ignoble, the tenure of winning is so brief; and the specter of the has-been-a shameful rather than a pitiable sight today-brings a sudden chill even to our sunlit moments.”

— Louis Kronenberger

36. “In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.”

— Louis Kronenberger

37. “Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.”

— Louis Kronenberger

38. “Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn’t everything.”

— Louis Kronenberger

39. “One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism.”

— Louis Kronenberger

40. “Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.”

— Louis Kronenberger

41. “This is, i think, very much the Age of Anxiety, the age of the neurosis, because along with so much that weighs on our minds there is perhaps even more that grates on our nerves.”

— Louis Kronenberger

42. “Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.”

— Louis Kronenberger

43. “Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.”

— Louis Kronenberger

44. “From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.”

— Louis Kronenberger

45. “The essence of the expert is that his field shall be very special and narrow: one of the ways in which he inspires confidence is to rigidly limit himself to the little toe; he would scarcely venture an off-the-record opinion on an infected little finger.”

— Louis Kronenberger

46. “If it is the great delusion of moralists to suppose that all previous ages were less sinful than their own, then it is the great delusion of intellectuals to suppose that all previous ages were less sick.”

— Louis Kronenberger

47. “Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized?”

— Louis Kronenberger

48. “Doubtless a good general rule for close friendships, where confidences are freely exchanged, is that what one is not informed about, one may not inquire about.”

— Louis Kronenberger

49. “The moving van is a symbol of more than our restlessness, it is the most conclusive evidence possible of our progress.”

— Louis Kronenberger

50. “The life of sense begins by assuming that we can only fitfully live the life of reason.”

— Louis Kronenberger