We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.

All greatness in style begins, I imagine, with such respect, deep and passionate enough to produce a humility which will not assert itself at the expense even of inanimate things: out of which submissiveness a desire to serve is born, in disinterested accuracy toward the object, whatever it may be.

... I cannot think a civilization worth having that does not encourage and enable its subjects to spend something, not extorted by governments but freely given to keep wretchedness at least from the streets they walk through day by day.

Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

youth looks at its world and age looks through it; youth must get busy on problems whose outlines stand single and strenuous before it, while age can, with luck, achieve a cosmic private harmony unsuited for action as a rule.

Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.