There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.

A really great person is the person who makes every person feel great.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it.

Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.

I would never commit the positively anti-social action of robbing a bank, or worse still, working in one.

[There is] one distinctly human thing - the story. There can be as good science about a turnip as about a man. ... [Or philosophy, or theology] ...There can be, without any question at all, as good higher mathematics about a turnip as about a man. But I do not think, though I speak in a manner somewhat tentative, that there could be as good a novel written about a turnip as a man.

If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.