Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever.

Friendship should be a private pleasure, not a public boast. I loathe those braggarts who are forever trying to invest themselves with importance by calling important people by their first names in or out of print. Such first-naming for effect makes me cringe.

What happiness is, no person can say for another. But no one, I am convinced, can be happy who lives only for himself. The joy of living comes from immersion in something that we know to be bigger, better, more enduring and worthier than we are.

The more one has seen of the good, the more one asks for the better.

A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but says what someone wants to remember.

The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.

Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason and invective for documentation than in politics.