Top 35 William Dean Howells Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it’s too late to let her know that he sees it.”

— William Dean Howells

2. “People naturally despise a dependant.”

— William Dean Howells

3. “It is the still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom.”

— William Dean Howells

4. “Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself.”

— William Dean Howells

5. “Live all you can. It’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t matter what you do – but live. This place makes it all come over me. I see it now. I haven’t done so – and now I’m old. It’s too late. It has gone past me – I’ve lost it. You have time. You are young. Live!”

— William Dean Howells

6. “Do not trouble yourselves about standards or ideals; but try to be faithful and natural: remember that there is no greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth to your own knowledge of things; and keep on working, even if your work is not long remembered.”

— William Dean Howells

7. “Some people stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.”

— William Dean Howells

8. “The secret of a man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested.”

— William Dean Howells

9. “By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is ugly, and it is only the ugly that is universal.”

— William Dean Howells

10. “We are creatures of the moment; we live from one little space to another, and only one interest at a time fills these.”

— William Dean Howells

11. “He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence.”

— William Dean Howells

12. “Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.”

— William Dean Howells

13. “It is the curse of prosperity that it takes work away from us, and shuts that door to hope and health of spirit.”

— William Dean Howells

14. “The conqueror is regarded with awe; the wise man commands our respect; but it is only the benevolent man that wins our affection.”

— William Dean Howells

15. “Wisdom and goodness are twin-born, one heart must hold both sisters, never seen apart.”

— William Dean Howells

16. “All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.”

— William Dean Howells

17. “The disposition to give a cup of cold water to a disciple is a far nobler property than the finest intellect. Satan has a fine intellect, but not the image of God.”

— William Dean Howells

18. “Is it worth while to observe that there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?”

— William Dean Howells

19. “If ever the public was betrayed by its press, it’s ours.”

— William Dean Howells

20. “A friend knows how to allow for mere quantity in your talk, and only replies to the quality.”

— William Dean Howells

21. “She liked the words; they satisfied her famine for phrases.”

— William Dean Howells

22. “The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you.”

— William Dean Howells

23. “What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.”

— William Dean Howells

24. “The wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and sorrow.”

— William Dean Howells

25. “The wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment.”

— William Dean Howells

26. “Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them – are ruinous!”

— William Dean Howells

27. “No, no. I understand that. And I quite agree with you. But you know I’ve always contended that the affections could be made to combine pleasure and profit. I wouldn’t have a man marry for money, – that would be rather bad, – but I don’t see why, when it comes to falling in love, a man shouldn’t fall in love with a rich girl as easily as a poor one. Some of the rich girls are very nice, and I should.”

— William Dean Howells

28. “It was not a particularly sane spectacle, that impatience to be off to some place that lay not only in the distance, but also in the future – to which no line of road carries you with absolute certainty across an interval of time full of every imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to buy a ticket to Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrive there. Say that all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive?”

— William Dean Howells

29. “Primitive societies without religion have never been found.”

— William Dean Howells

30. “You’ll find as you grow older that you weren’t born such a great while ago after all. The time shortens up.”

— William Dean Howells

31. “How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us?”

— William Dean Howells

32. “The difficulty is to know conscience from self-interest.”

— William Dean Howells

33. “In Europe life is histrionic and dramatized, and in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere.”

— William Dean Howells

34. “I wonder why we hate the past so.”

— William Dean Howells

35. “There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.”

— William Dean Howells

36. “Preach the blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our eight-inch guns.”

— William Dean Howells

37. “If we like a man’s dream, we call him a reformer; if we don’t like his dream, we call him a crank.”

— William Dean Howells

38. “The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.”

— William Dean Howells