The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.

The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none, for a man cannot be said to be"on the side of the stars" at all, unless he makes refusals.

Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.

Successful socialism depends on the perfectibility of man. Unless all, or nearly all, men are high-minded and clear-sighted, it isbound to be a rotten failure in any but a physical sense. Even through it is altruism, socialism means materialism. You can guarantee the things of the body to every one, but you cannot guarantee the things of the spirit to every one; you can guarantee only that the opportunity to seek them shall not be denied to any one who chooses to seek them.

democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical.

When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense.

Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.