All our lives we are putting pennies — our most golden pennies — into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.

The world is not unkind, and reprobates are worse than their reputations.

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection -even though nothing more than the pounding of an old piano -is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.

I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don't desire.

People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

When we say we are certain so-and-so can't possibly have done it, what we mean is that we think he very likely did.

For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipations.