Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.

The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.

Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.

There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out.

It is almost impossible for an Anglo-Saxon to write of sex without being dirty.