It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one's soul. Do not fancy you can be a detached wit and avoid being a buffoon; you cannot. If you are the Court Jester you must be the Court Fool.

...It's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things.

All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers.

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.