People will invite you and seek you constantly if you learn how to give them the extreme pleasure of being clever. People adore the one who encourages them to display their conversational wares and admires the display.

You can never be free from limitation until you are willing to recognize that you and you alone are responsible for what you are. After you have passed infancy you are not a victim of anything but your own thinking.

they're the sort of people one invites to lunch or tea, but never to dinner.

Flirting is a cheap, dangerous shortcut to get something you can't hold after you get it.

People make life. The more people, the more life.

The steadily inward look leads us all to death, nations as well as persons, and is equally infantile in them all. Perhaps the most useful thing I have learned in my lifetime is that the process of maturing gradually turns the mind away from the small-self to the greater-self that is only served by serving others.

If Democracy should fail, it would be because we had been so lacking in self-discipline that our personal problems had taken all our substance and energies, leaving us nothing of value to contribute to the commonwealth.