Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.