The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honor about ideas; he will not see that one must pay for an idea as well as for anything else. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other.

Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.

The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.

Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred.

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.

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