We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time, or we shall stick in the mud. Yet neither must we undertake a new world as catastrophic Utopians, and wreck our civilization in our hurry to mend it.

If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.

Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity, except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition.

The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

I wish people would stop talking about my birthday.

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

Newspaper : A device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.