To divide one's life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.

There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.

The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.

If food is the body of good living, wine is its soul.

Wine is a civilizing agent.

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

The drinking of wine seems to me to have a moral edge over many pleasures and hobbies in that it promotes love of one's neighbor.