Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

In the history of thought and culture the dark nights have perhaps in some ways cost mankind less grief than the false dawns, the prison houses in which hope persists less grief than the promised lands where hope expires.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

It is one of the sublime provincialities of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they've never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall.

We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.