Explore Quotes by John Mason Brown

How prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid out Washington as a city that goes around in circles!

The critic is a man who prefers the indolence of opinion to the trials of action.

The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace.

What happiness is, no person can say for another. But no one, I am convinced, can be happy who lives only for himself. The joy of living comes from immersion in something that we know to be bigger, better, more enduring and worthier than we are.

I am ready any time. Do not keep me waiting.

The more one has seen of the good, the more one asks for the better.

No one is worthy of a good home here or in heaven that is not willing to be in peril for a good cause.

So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Charm is a glow within a woman which casts a most becoming light on others.

Some television programs are so much chewing gum for the eyes.

The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.

It is in the hard, hard rockpile labor of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing again comes in.

God spare me sclerosis of the curiosity, for the curiosity which craves to keep us informed about the small things no less than the large is the mainspring, the dynamo, the jet propulsion of all complete living.

She knows what is the best purpose of education: not to be frightened by the best but to treat it as part of daily life.

Friendship should be a private pleasure, not a public boast. I loathe those braggarts who are forever trying to invest themselves with importance by calling important people by their first names in or out of print. Such first-naming for effect makes me cringe.

Reasoning with a child is fine, if you can reach the child's reason without destroying your own.

What a man is is the basis owhat he dreams and thinks, accepts and rejects, feels and perceives.

Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason and invective for documentation than in politics.

No man, with a man's heart in him gets far on his way without some bitter, soul-searching disappointment. Happy is he who is brave enough to push on to another stage of the journey.