Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.

One of the reasons, surely, why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them.

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.

[Science] has challenged the super-eminence of religion; it has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend on it; and it has bribed the skeptics by giving us immense material comforts.

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.

... the more we recruit from immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about culture, or even know what it is.

... if a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.