Top 250 Sinclair Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “She was a woman with a working brain and no work.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

104. “I don’t pretend to be a very educated man, except maybe educated in the heart, and in being able to feel for the sorrows and fears of every ornery fellow human being.”

— Sinclair Lewis

105. “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

106. “But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.”

— Sinclair Lewis

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

112. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

117. “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

118. “Babbitt knew that in this place of death Paul was already dead. And as he pondered on the train home something in his own self seemed to have died: a loyal and vigorous faith in the goodness of the world, a fear of public disfavor, a pride in success.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

120. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

122. “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

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. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

129. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

134. “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

135. “Morning always promises miracles.”

— Sinclair Lewis

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

145. “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

146. “What an eternal art it is – such a glittery delightful art – finding hard names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for ourselves!”

— Sinclair Lewis

147. “Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics.”

— Sinclair Lewis

148. “Honestly, I think that the sense of humor of the people that TALK about having a ‘sense of humor’ is a worse vice than drinking.”

— Sinclair Lewis

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

— Sinclair Lewis

150. “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