The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

Most Americans ... have a sort of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of invisible champagne.

A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane.

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - 'free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.