It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer.

The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.

Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think this frost-fire is a portent somehow: a promise that the continent has given us. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen.

That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.

Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.