There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfill the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love.

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.

The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.

An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.

We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.