No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

there are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.

To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.

Dignity is an anachronism.

... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.

nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.

One cannot lay a foundation by scattering stones, nor is a reputation for good work to be got by strewing volumes about the world.