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

Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

One must never judge the writer by the man; but one may fairly judge the man by the writer.

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

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

Having disciples is in the end like having children, only not with love but with self-love preeminent.

On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit. Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.