[On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug.

Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style.

If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

What God lacks is convictions- stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something- not try to be everything.

What a man misses mostly in heaven is company.

The low level which commercial morality has reached in America is deplorable. We have humble God fearing Christian men among us who will stoop to do things for a million dollars that they ought not to be willing to do for less than 2 millions.

Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.