Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill.

The Expulsion from Eden is an act of vindictive womanish spite; the Fall of Man, as recounted in the Bible, comes nearer to the Fall of God.

Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?

We fear something before we hate.

There is no suicide for which all society is not responsible.

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.