The world of the egotist is, inevitably, a narrow world, and the boundaries of self are limited to the close horizon of personality.... But, within this horizon, there is room for many attributes that are excellent.

The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.

I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.

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

When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release?

To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.