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.

I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.

A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.

As between mileage and experience choose experience.

My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat

What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.

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.