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

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

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

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

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

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.

... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?