... 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.

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

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.

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

men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.

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.

Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.