I've been to every park in every city and not seen a statue to a committee.

It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.

I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.

If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

The fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure and an education in gratitude.

But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.