I have never heard enough classical music to be able to enjoy it; & the simple truth is, I detest it. Not mildly, but will all my heart. To me an opera is the very climax & cap-stone of the absurd, the fantastic the unjustifiable. I hate the very name of opera - partly because of the nights of suffering I have endured in its presence, & partly because I want to love it and can't.

Comparison is the death of joy.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

The timid man yearns for full value and demands a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.

The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.