The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

Nothing taken for granted; everything received with gratitude; everything passed on with grace.

People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life.

The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.

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.