Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.

No man knows he is young while he is young.

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial.