Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole.

If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.

That is the consolation of a little mind; you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.

Fill an author with a titanic fame and you do not make him titanic; you often merely burst him.

There ought to be some sign in a book about man, that the writer knows thoroughly one man at least.

Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape.

Literary people are forever judging the quality of the mind by the turn of expression.