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

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

Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.

Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?

Distaste sounds more emphatic when expressed as moral disapproval. With most of us the moral counterblast is nothing more than the angry rendering of a yawn.

We do not mind our not arriving anywhere nearly so much as our not having any company on the way.

In middle life politics are not a mental acquisition; they are a temperament.