The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoir-faire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect.

To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.

There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to "Americanize" him.

To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.

Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.