“It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.”

The tourist may complain of other tourists, but he would be lost without them.

The audience is the controlling factor in the actor’s life. It is practically infallible, since there is no appeal from its verdict. It is a little like a supreme court composed of irresponsible minors.

It was hard to speed the male child up the stony heights of erudition, but it was harder still to check the female child at the crucial point, and keep her tottering decorously behind her brother.

Cats, even when robust, have scant liking for the boisterous society of children, and are apt to exert their utmost ingenuity to escape it. Nor are they without adult sympathy in their prejudice.

Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.

No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.

The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.

There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor.

Like simplicity and candor, and other much-commented qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its charm.

The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world’s mirth.

The most charming thing about youth is the tenacity of its impressions.

Letter-writing on the part of a busy man or woman is the quintessence of generosity.

There is no illusion so permanent as that which enables us to look backward with complacency; there is no mental process so deceptive as the comparing of recollections with realities.

The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.

In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

I’ve learned that something constructive comes from every defeat.

Pattern-finding is the purpose of the mind and the construct of the universe.

Construct well being or produce illness in your self.

Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.

There’s nothing wrong with anger provided you use it constructively.