I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.

Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites of truth.

... if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season.

Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude.

I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.

I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.

The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.