H. L. Mencken Quotes About Feelings

• Self-respect - The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

  H. L. Mencken

  Respect, Self, Personality

  "A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing". Book edited by H. L. Mencken, 1949.

• Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place

  H. L. Mencken

  Confidence, Lying, Believe

• I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Order, Giving

• To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am - a man of my peculiar weakness, vanities, appetites, and aversions - can be so happy as he can be in the United States.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Men, Vanity

  "On Being An American". Book by H. L. Mencken, 1922.

• The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.

  H. L. Mencken

  Music, Feelings, Mirth

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.524, Vintage

• Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

  H. L. Mencken

  Happiness, Marriage, Men

• No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.

  H. L. Mencken

  Trust, Believe, Men

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.10, Vintage

• The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it when it is broken to moral uses--in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.

  H. L. Mencken

  Art, Men, Broken

  H.L. Mencken (1920). “Prejudices Second Series”

• I am, in fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost as much as I detest missionaries. My writings, such as they are, have had only one purpose: to attain for H. L. Mencken that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Giving, Feelings

  "For the Defense Written for the Associated Press, for use in my obituary" by H. L. Mencken, November 20, 1940.

• The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.

  H. L. Mencken

  Husband, Children, Father

  H. L. Mencken (2015). “In Defense of Women: Human Sexuality”, p.42, 谷月社

You May Also Like:

George Jean Nathan

Friedrich Nietzsche

Mark Twain

Clarence Darrow

Sinclair Lewis

Ambrose Bierce

John T. Scopes