Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.

I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.

What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.

It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.