You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one.

... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.

Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin.

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

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

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

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.