Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.

Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver's Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children's book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That's what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story.

For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.

What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves.