Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.

Immature ists imitate. Mature ists steal.

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.