Bernard De Voto Quotes (10 Quotes)

The water of life was given to us to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger than without its vision there is any evidence we are.

The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. When you reach the line which marks that drop for convenience, the one hundredth meridian you have reached the West.

The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.

Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.

You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest-lived.

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.

Between the amateur and the professional ... there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different integration, a different nervous and muscular and psychological organization.... A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.

History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.

New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end.... It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America.