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

When the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.

Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.

People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.

if a man be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably credit him with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand, lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness.

Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature, and is purifying only in so far as there is a natural and unschooled goodness in the human heart.

A puppy is but a dog, plus high spirits, and minus common sense.

There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.

No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.

The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.

A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.

To have given pleasure to one human being is a recollection that sweetens life.

Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.

It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.

A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.

Traveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.

I’m hopeful that the energy efficiency and public buildings bill will have their endorsement.

This high proportion of history’s decisive campaigns, the significance of which is enhanced by the comparative rarity of the direct approach, enforces the conclusion that the indirect is by far the most hopeful and economic form of strategy.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

In turn, we will be tempted to kill our computers, but we won’t dare because we are already utterly, irreversibly dependent on these hopeful monsters that make modern life possible.

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

So that when it was time to shoot I could hopefully exhale [ Harriet Tubman ].

New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.

Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own.