I have lived to see that being seventeen is no protection against becoming seventy, but to know this needs the experience of a lifetime, for no imagination copes with it.

Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.

Contrast is the dramatist's method.

It has always struck me that one of the readiest ways of estimating a country's regard for law is to notice what arms the officers of the law are carrying: in England it is little batons, in France swords, in many countries revolvers, and in Russia the police used to have artillery.

Humanity, let us say, is like people packed in a automobile which is traveling downhill without lights at a terrific speed and driven by a four-year-old child. The signposts along the way are all marked "progress."

Then I perceived, what I had never thought, that all these staring houses were not alike, but different one from another, because they held different dreams.

I think that travel comes from some deep urge to see the world, like the urge that brings up a worm in an Irish bog to see the moon when it is full.