The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.

And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.

Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.

The determining bulk of Scotch people had heard of golf ever since they had heard of God and often considered the two as of equal importance.

Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.