Daily Inspiration Quote by Van Wyck Brooks

Brooks is skewering a peculiarly American form of deprivation: not the absence of taste, but the presence of taste on credit. “Worldly standards” are the refined expectations you absorb from culture - what a good life is supposed to look like, sound like, feel like. “Worldly means” are the blunt instruments that make those expectations doable: money, leisure, connections, the quiet confidence of belonging. The sadness isn’t poverty in the abstract; it’s the mismatch between aspiration and access, the psychic abrasion of wanting the right things for the wrong reasons, and being punished for wanting them at all.

As a critic, Brooks understood that standards don’t originate in a vacuum. They’re taught - by magazines, salons, universities, patronage networks, and the subtle social theater of who gets invited where. The line carries a sharp moral suspicion: standards can be a kind of internalized class discipline, a ruler you use to measure your own failure. If you’ve been trained to crave “the world” but denied the tools to enter it, you live in permanent comparison mode, with no dignified exit ramp.

The subtext is also a critique of cultural gatekeeping. Brooks is pointing at a society that sells cosmopolitan ideals while rationing the entry fee. It’s a sentence from the early 20th-century churn of status anxiety - a period when mass culture expanded desire faster than mobility could fulfill it. The sting comes from its precision: heartbreak, here, is not longing. It’s longing with a price tag you can read but can’t pay.