“Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation.”

The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.

Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth.

Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays ’em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera–or war or fiction.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure–wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.

I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity

Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.

Good Lord, I don’t know what ‘rights’ a man has! And I don’t know the solution of boredom. If I did, I’d be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull.

The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, “The trouble with this country is….”

Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.

Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.

if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths.

When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, ’tain’t any laughing matter!

People will buy anything that is one to a customer.

The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn’t talk about it. She does her work.

For a long time, I was almost ashamed of being an actress. I felt like it was a shallow occupation. People would be watching my every move.

Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting.

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.

If the German people lay down their arms the whole of Eastern and Southern Europe, together with the Reich, will come under Russian occupation. Behind an iron curtain mass butcheries of people would begin.

In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.

In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.