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

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.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.

There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.

People with theories of life are, perhaps, the most relentless of their kind, for no time or place is sacred from their devastating elucidations.

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.