Temperament, like liberty, is important despite how many crimes are committed in its name.

Someone who gossips well has a reputation for being good company or even a wit, never for being a gossip.

Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.

The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.

One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism.

Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.