We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell.

There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic-that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him.

The moderns do not realize modernity.

All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.

The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.

All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.