Top 150 Rex Stout Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality.”

— Rex Stout

2. “There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.”

— Rex Stout

3. “Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.”

— Rex Stout

4. “That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.”

— Rex Stout

5. “Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.”

— Rex Stout

6. “Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.”

— Rex Stout

7. “Is this Nero Wolfe’s house?” The voice got me one-half awake. “Yes. Archie Goodwin.” “This is Sarah Jaffee. I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Goodwin, did I wake you up?” “Not quite. Go ahead and finish it.”

— Rex Stout

8. “The avoidance of idiocy should be the primary and constant concern of every intelligent person,” – Nero Wolfe.”

— Rex Stout

9. “The avoidance of idiocy should be the primary and constant concern of every intelligent person. It is mine. I am sometimes successful.”

— Rex Stout

10. “The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold – if you have one.”

— Rex Stout

11. “I love to make a mistake. It is my only assurance that I cannot reasonably be expected to assume the responsibility of omniscience.”

— Rex Stout

12. “Opinions, from experts, cost money.”

— Rex Stout

13. “If personal vengeance were the only factor I could, as you suggested, go and stick a knife in him and finish it, but that would be accepting the intolerable doctrine that man’s sole responsibility is to his ego. That was the doctrine of Hitler, as it is now of Malenkov and Tito and Franco and Senator McCarthy; masquerading as a basis of freedom, it is the oldest and toughest of the enemies of freedom.”

— Rex Stout

14. “Everything in a story should be credible.”

— Rex Stout

15. “The constant petty behests of life permit few opportunities for major satisfactions, and when one is offered it should be seized.”

— Rex Stout

16. “A hole in the ice is dangerous only to those who go skating.”

— Rex Stout

17. “I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies, loud noises, and oiliness.”

— Rex Stout

18. “War doesn’t mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.”

— Rex Stout

19. “He’s sick.” “What with?” “Sitzenlust. Chronic. The opposite of wanderlust.”

— Rex Stout

20. “The only thing I want is something I can’t have; and that is to know if, 100 years from now, people will still buy my books.”

— Rex Stout

21. “Sometimes it’s things that take the joy out of life, like a blowout when you’re hitting sixty or a button coming off of a shirt when you’re in a hurry, but usually it’s people.”

— Rex Stout

22. “I don’t answer questions containing two or more unsupported assumptions.”

— Rex Stout

23. “Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.”

— Rex Stout

24. “Being broke is not a disgrace, it is only a catastrophe.”

— Rex Stout

25. “God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.”

— Rex Stout

26. “A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.”

— Rex Stout

27. “To read of a detective’s daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.”

— Rex Stout

28. “Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled.”

— Rex Stout

29. “There’s nothing as safe as ignorance or as dangerous.”

— Rex Stout

30. “MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.”

— Rex Stout

31. “No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket.”

— Rex Stout

32. “The trouble with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes off.”

— Rex Stout

33. “Sarcasm is not the rapier of wit its wielders seem to believe it to be, but merely a club: it may, by dint of brute force, occasionally raise bruises, but it never cuts or pierces.”

— Rex Stout

34. “Bosh. I find a rival – but no, I won’t flatter myself that Tecumseh Fox would consider himself a rival of Dol Bonner – I find an eminent detective in your apartment, and that alone is enough, without adding that he is concealed in your bedroom while I am discussing my business with you...”

— Rex Stout

35. “Saul Panzer stood facing the cast, not the audience. There is nothing impressive about Saul. He is undersized, his nose and ears are too big, and his shoulders slant. With Saul a thousand wrongdoers had made the mistake of believing what they saw. He spoke. “I believe this is the way it was Thursday evening when Mr. Wolfe entered. Does anyone disagree?”

— Rex Stout

36. “It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.”

— Rex Stout

37. “He straightened up. “Your chief trouble,” he said, not offensively, “is that you think you’ve got a sense of humor. It confuses people, and you ought to get over it. Things strike you as funny. You thought it would be funny to have a talk with Rackham, and it may be all right this time, but someday something that you think is funny will blow your goddam head right off your shoulders.” Only after he had gone did it occur to me that that wouldn’t prove it wasn’t funny.”

— Rex Stout

38. “Subtlety chases the obvious up a never-ending spiral and never quite catches it.”

— Rex Stout

39. “To drink champagne with a blonde at one elbow and a brunette at the other gives a man a sense of well-being, and.”

— Rex Stout

40. “I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.”

— Rex Stout

41. “What do I believe in? Belief means faith, and there’s only one damned thing in the world I have any faith in. That’s the idea of American democracy, because it seems to me so obvious that that’s the only sensible way to run human affairs.”

— Rex Stout

42. “It is indubitable that Carol Mardus was the mother of the baby left in Mrs. Valdon’s vestibule and that she was gravely disquieted to learn that I knew it and could demonstrate it.”

— Rex Stout

43. “We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.”

— Rex Stout

44. “One trouble with living beyond your deserved number of years is that there’s always some reason to live another year. And I’d like to live another year so that Nixon won’t be President. If he’s re-elected I’ll have to live another four years.”

— Rex Stout

45. “All my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made.”

— Rex Stout

46. “Dignities are like faces; no two are the same.”

— Rex Stout

47. “Everyone has something they don’t want anyone to see; that is one of the functions of a home, to provide a spot to keep such things.”

— Rex Stout

48. “A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.”

— Rex Stout

49. “The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.”

— Rex Stout

50. “Courtesy is one’s own affair, but decency is a debt to life.”

— Rex Stout