Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.

The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.

Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.

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.