Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.

When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children. We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations.

No man must be superior to the things that are common to men.... Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

Most Americans are born drunk, and really require a little wine or beer to sober them.

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.