Life & Wisdom Quote by Henry Van Dyke

There is a sly civics lesson hiding in Van Dyke's nature writing: admiration is not the same as intimacy. By pairing rivers with people, he borrows the moral authority of the landscape, then flips the expected romance of “greatness.” A great river can be essential to trade, history, and imagination, yet also flood, erode, and refuse to be tamed. Van Dyke smuggles that same double vision into human character. The line is a gentle rebuke to the American habit (especially in the late 19th and early 20th century) of equating scale with virtue: bigger careers, bigger personalities, bigger destinies.

The sentence works because it sounds like common sense and lands like social critique. “Greatest” invokes public metrics - fame, power, achievement - while “agreeable” and “best to live with” pull the reader into the domestic, private register where those metrics collapse. The subtext: history is crowded with towering figures who were exhausting spouses, domineering colleagues, or dangerous neighbors. Greatness often comes with turbulence, impatience, and an appetite for control, the human equivalents of rapids and spring runoff.

Van Dyke, a poet and clergyman steeped in Protestant moral vocabulary, isn’t sneering at excellence; he’s warning against worship. The point is less “avoid big personalities” than “don’t confuse significance with suitability.” Choose your heroes like you choose a riverbank: with respect for what it can do, and clear-eyed about what it will do to you up close.