For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement.

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.

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.

if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.

Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit.

It is not strange that some of our revoltes preach trial marriage: for the only safe way to marry them at all would be on trial. Until you had definitely experienced all the human situations with them, you would have no means of knowing how, in any given situation, they would behave. They might conform about evening-dress, and throw plates between courses; they might be charming to your friends, and ask the waiter to sit down and finish dinner with you. Or they might in all things, little and big, be irreproachable. The point is that you would never know.

There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love.