The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.

The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.