“If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.”

While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.

When people don’t have an objective, there’s much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

The whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.

To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.

Of all the ills that our poor … society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.

Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.

Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.

The degree of notoriety I have is fine and easy. There’s nothing hysterical about it.

I think I have a degree of confidence, but I also have terrible insecurity, like anybody does.

The student-athlete should control everything that happens. From figuring out what kind of a degree they want to what type of a program they want to play for, they should control it all.

Where Religion does take place and is effectual, it makes this world, in measure and degree, representative of Heaven.

German is of stone, limestone, pudding stone, marble, granite even, and so to a considerable degree is English, whereas French is bronze and gives out a metallic resonance with tones that neither German nor English tolerate.

The last degree of love is when He gave Himself to us to be our Food; because He gave Himself to be united with us in every way.

The difference is no less real because it is of degree.

We’ve poisoned our planet to a desperate degree. We have no idea of how severe the toxification is.