Humor simultaneously wounds and heals, indicts and pardons, diminishes and enlarges; it constitutes inner growth at the expense of outer gain, and those who possess and honestly practice it make themselves more through a willingness to make themselves less.

Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized?

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

It is disgusting to pick your teeth; what is vulgar is to use a gold toothpick.

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.