The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.