The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts -the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria -are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.

A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.

A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness.