The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.

A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.

All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national.

The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

The modern mind will accept nothing on authority, but will accept anything on no authority. Say that the Bible or the Pope says so and it will be dismissed without further examination. But preface your remark with "I think I heard somewhere," or, try but fail to remember the name of some professor who might have said "such-and-such," and it will be immediately accepted as an unshakable fact.