Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.

Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, the sense of doom in the Calvinist.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

[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.

It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.