The cheese and wine party has the form of friendship without the warmth and devotion. It is a device either for getting rid of social obligations hurriedly en mass, or for making overtures towards more serious social relationships, as in the etiquette of whoring.

Brooks Atkinson

Categorized in : Serious Wine Party

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.

Brooks Atkinson

holiday new-year memories

In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

Brooks Atkinson

atheism age people

Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Brooks Atkinson

poetry-is thinking

Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy.

Brooks Atkinson

bureaucracy spiritual enemy

This nation was built by men who took risks-pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, businessmen who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action.

Brooks Atkinson

dreamer risk men

The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

Brooks Atkinson

views life science

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

Brooks Atkinson

responsibility fear believe

The humorous man recognizes that absolute purity, absolute justice, absolute logic and perfection are beyond human achievement and that men have been able to live happily for thousands of years in a state of genial frailty.

Brooks Atkinson

humorous men years

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Brooks Atkinson

college graduation men

Say "Yes" to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky. Say "Yes" to the universe and the planets become your neighbors. Say "Yes" to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia.

Brooks Atkinson

dream sky attitude

Land was created to provide a place for boats to visit.

Brooks Atkinson

pirate land sea

The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.

Brooks Atkinson

responsibility perfect men

The evil that men do lives on the front pages of greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred apathetically inside.

Brooks Atkinson

evil men life

Nothing a man writes can please him as profoundly as something he does with his back, shoulders and hands. For writing is an artificial activity. It is a lonely and private substitute for conversation.

Brooks Atkinson

lonely writing men

We tolerate differences of opinion in people who are familiar to us. But differences of opinion in people we do not know sound like heresy or plots.

Brooks Atkinson

differences sound people

Walking companions, like heroes, are difficult to pluck out of the crowd of acquaintances. Good dispositions, ready wit, friendly conversation serve well enough by the fireside but they prove insufficient in the field. For there you need transcendentalists-nothing less; you need poets, sages, humorists and natural philosophers.

Brooks Atkinson

sage hero friendly

Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.

Brooks Atkinson

theatre sides people

Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.

Brooks Atkinson

theatre crazy play

It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.

Brooks Atkinson

quintessence has-beens truth

New Yorkers are inclined to assume it will never rain, and certainly not on New Yorkers.

Brooks Atkinson

assuming new-york rain