There should be a dash of the amateur in criticism. For the amateur is a man of enthusiasm who has not settled down and is not habit bound.

Materialism is decadent and degenerate only if the spirit of the nation has withered and if individual people are so unimaginative that they wallow in it.

Walking companions, like heroes, are difficult to pluck out of the crowd of acquaintances. Good dispositions, ready wit, friendly conversation serve well enough by the fireside but they prove insufficient in the field. For there you need transcendentalists-nothing less; you need poets, sages, humorists and natural philosophers.

Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work.

In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting; there are only uninterested people.

The cult of nature is a form of patronage by people who have declared their materialistic independence from nature and do not have to struggle with nature every day of their lives.