We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.

One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness.

The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.