Top 250 Sinclair Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-.”

— Sinclair Lewis

102. “When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, ’tain’t any laughing matter!”

— Sinclair Lewis

103. “On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.”

— Sinclair Lewis

104. “The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.”

— Sinclair Lewis

105. “The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.”

— Sinclair Lewis

106. “To the connoisseur of scenes, nothing is more enjoyable than a thorough, melodramatic, egoistic humility.”

— Sinclair Lewis

107. “In everything was the spirit of children’s play – not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.”

— Sinclair Lewis

108. “The shame of emotion overpowered them; they cursed a little, to prove they were good rough fellows; and in a mellow silence, Babbitt whistling while Paul hummed, they paddled back to the hotel.”

— Sinclair Lewis

109. “Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing to be told which may not be heard on every summer evening, on every shadowy block.”

— Sinclair Lewis

110. “Reek took not more than an hour to relate what would’ve taken the most intelligent man five or six hours – that is, five minutes of speech and the rest of the five hours to recover from the nausea caused by having to utter such shameless rot...”

— Sinclair Lewis

111. “In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.”

— Sinclair Lewis

112. “It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.”

— Sinclair Lewis

113. “Eddie Fislinger’s church was an octagonal affair, with the pulpit in one angle, an arrangement which produced a fascinating, rather dizzy effect, reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination.”

— Sinclair Lewis

114. “Why, she said, with a smile which snapped back after using as abruptly as a stretched rubber band, didn’t he take a nice walk?”

— Sinclair Lewis

115. “Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.”

— Sinclair Lewis

116. “She watched the hulk of marriage drifting down on her frail speed-boat of aspiration, and steered in desperate circles.”

— Sinclair Lewis

117. “Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.”

— Sinclair Lewis

118. “Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere – not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs!”

— Sinclair Lewis

119. “On the walk, like shredded lovely flesh, were the petals of the last gallant rose.”

— Sinclair Lewis

120. “The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.”

— Sinclair Lewis

121. “There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.”

— Sinclair Lewis

122. “But it was indecent, it was sacrilegious to annoy an emperor, and in his irritation he had an ex-Senator and twelve workmen who were in concentration camps taken out and shot on the charge that they had told irreverent stories about him.”

— Sinclair Lewis

123. “The Wonderlust – probably it’s a worse affliction than the Wanderlust.”

— Sinclair Lewis

124. “Sandy, you have to stumble every so often; have to learn by making mistakes.”

— Sinclair Lewis

125. “Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?”

— Sinclair Lewis

126. “It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: ‘You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don’t believe in it, then you MUST live up to it!”

— Sinclair Lewis

127. “He had learned how to assemble Jewish texts, Greek philosophy, and Middle-Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon. And he had learned that poverty was blessed, but that bankers make the best deacons.”

— Sinclair Lewis

128. “There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.”

— Sinclair Lewis

129. “And for all her theoretical desire to make their house a refuge for him and for whomever he liked to invite, she had never learned to keep her opinions of people to herself. When she was bored by callers, she would beg “Do you mind if I run up to bed now – such a headache,” with a bright friendliness which fooled no one save herself, and which left their guests chilled and awkward.”

— Sinclair Lewis

130. “That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.”

— Sinclair Lewis

131. “Street, and she was able to give Elmer the three hundred.”

— Sinclair Lewis

132. “Morning always promises miracles.”

— Sinclair Lewis

133. “It was not an esthetic room. Though Frank Shallard might have come to admire pictures, great music, civilized furniture, he had been trained to regard them as worldly, and to content himself with art which ‘presented a message,’ to regard ‘Les Miserables’ as superior because the bishop was a kind man, and ‘The Scarlet Letter’ as a poor book because the heroine was sinful and the author didn’t mind.”

— Sinclair Lewis

134. “Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?”

— Sinclair Lewis

135. “She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka her ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that she was alive.”

— Sinclair Lewis

136. “I think perhaps we want a more conscious life.”

— Sinclair Lewis

137. “I’m not sure that I shall. I’m trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I’ve failed at every positive thing I’ve tried. I’d better ‘settle down,’ as they call it, and be satisfied to be – nothing.”

— Sinclair Lewis

138. “America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a gay nation. Rather it had been heavily and noisily jocular, with a substratum of worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron saint, Lincoln of the rollicking stories and the tragic heart.”

— Sinclair Lewis

139. “We don’t want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning.”

— Sinclair Lewis

140. “I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.”

— Sinclair Lewis

141. “Life is comfortable and clean enough here already. And so secure. What it needs it to be less secure, more eager.”

— Sinclair Lewis

142. “The author says one character’s definition of a classic is any book he’d heard of before he was thirty.”

— Sinclair Lewis

143. “There was nothing to say to tragedy that had outlived hope.”

— Sinclair Lewis

144. “Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.”

— Sinclair Lewis

145. “She wanted, just now, to have a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde of grateful poor.”

— Sinclair Lewis

146. “Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, was unembittered laughter.”

— Sinclair Lewis

147. “What conceivable reason could one have for seeking after righteousness in a world which so hated righteousness?”

— Sinclair Lewis

148. “Those of you who have listened to me before will understand that I – or rather that the League of Forgotten Men – has no quarrel with individual Jews; that we are proud to have Rabbis among our directors; but those subversive international organizations which, unfortunately, are so largely Jewish, must be driven with whips and scorpions from off the face of the earth.”

— Sinclair Lewis

149. “In matrimonial geography the distance between the first mute recognition of a break and the admission thereof is as great as the distance between the first naive faith and the first doubting.”

— Sinclair Lewis

150. “In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being.”

— Sinclair Lewis