Max Eastman Quotes

Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.

- Max Eastman

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

- Max Eastman

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

- Max Eastman

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

- Max Eastman

A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.

- Max Eastman

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.

- Max Eastman

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

- Max Eastman

Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind.

- Max Eastman

People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.

- Max Eastman

Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.

- Max Eastman

A smile is the universal welcome.

- Max Eastman

I don't know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while.

- Max Eastman

Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.

- Max Eastman

A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.

- Max Eastman

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

- Max Eastman

The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.

- Max Eastman