“There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.”

The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.

the labors of the true critic are more essential to the author, even, than to the reader.

A kitten is the most irresistible comedian in the world. Its wide-open eyes gleam with wonder and mirth. It darts madly at nothing at all, and then, as though suddenly checked in the pursuit, prances sideways on its hind legs with ridiculous agility and zeal.

If we go to church we are confronted with a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its side.

Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.

I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn’t, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.

The sanguine assurance that men and nations can be legislated into goodness, that pressure from without is equivalent to a moral change within, needs a strong backing of inexperience.

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.

The dog is guided by kindly instinct to the man or woman whose heart is open to his advances. The cat often leaves the friend who courts her, to honor, or to harass, the unfortunate mortal who shudders at her unwelcome caresses.

There is no liberal education for the under-languaged.

The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.

Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue.

Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused.

A man who owns a dog is, in every sense of the words, its master; the term expresses accurately their mutual relations. But it is ridiculous when applied to the limited possession of a cat.

The human race may be divided into people who love cats and people who hate them; the neutrals being few in numbers, and, for intellectual and moral reasons, not worth considering.

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.

“I’m fine. I just…I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about…I just…want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.

When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.

We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.

Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.

Sometimes all I want is to be a few inches taller so the world does not look like a dense collection of torsos.