Sanity, soundness, and sincerity, of which gleams and strains can still be found in the human brain under powerful microscopes, flourish only in a culture of clarification, which is now becoming harder and harder to detect with the naked eye.

The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

I never had a dog that showed a human fear of death. Death, to a dog, is the final unavoidable compulsion, the least ineluctable scent on a fearsome trail, but they like to face it alone, going out into the woods, among the leaves, if there are any leaves when their time comes, enduring without sentimental human distraction the Last Loneliness, which they are wise enough to know cannot be shared by anyone.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.