Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.

Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.

When it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.

Nothing is certain by uncertainty.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.