Select Search ----- All Bartleby.com ----- All Reference ----- Columbia Encyclopedia World History Encyclopedia Cultural Literacy World Factbook Columbia Gazetteer American Heritage Coll. Dictionary Roget's Thesauri Roget's II: Thesaurus Roget's Int'l Thesaurus Quotations Bartlett's Quotations Columbia Quotations Simpson's Quotations Respectfully Quoted English Usage Modern Usage American English Fowler's King's English Strunk's Style Mencken's Language Cambridge History The King James Bible Oxford Shakespeare Gray's Anatomy Farmer's Cookbook Post's Etiquette Brewer's Phrase & Fable Bulfinch's Mythology Frazer's Golden Bough ----- All Verse ----- Anthologies Dickinson, E. Eliot, T.S. Frost, R. Hopkins, G.M. Keats, J. Lawrence, D.H. Masters, E.L. Sandburg, C. Sassoon, S. Whitman, W. Wordsworth, W. Yeats, W.B. ----- All Nonfiction ----- Harvard Classics American Essays Einstein's Relativity Grant, U.S. Roosevelt, T. Wells's History Presidential Inaugurals ----- All Fiction ----- Shelf of Fiction Ghost Stories Short Stories Shaw, G.B. Stein, G. Stevenson, R.L. Wells, H.G. Reference > Quotations > Simpson’s Quotations   PREVIOUS NEXT   CONTENTS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, compiled by James B. Simpson.  1988.     NUMBER: 4893 AUTHOR: Van Wyck Brooks QUOTATION: Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us. ATTRIBUTION: From a Writer’s Notebook Dutton 58 SUBJECTS: Humankind: Wisdom, Philosophy & Other Musings BIOGRAPHY: Columbia Encyclopedia.   Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, compiled by James B. Simpson. Copyright © 1988 by James B. Simpson. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. CONTENTS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD   PREVIOUS NEXT     Click here to shop the Bartleby Bookstore. Welcome · Press · Advertising · Linking · Terms of Use · © 2008 Bartleby.com