I represent the jolly mass of mankind. I am the happy and reckless Christian.

It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one's soul. Do not fancy you can be a detached wit and avoid being a buffoon; you cannot. If you are the Court Jester you must be the Court Fool.

They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.

Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.

[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.