There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. [On Lohengrin]

When it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men.

If true, rarely beautiful. If beautiful, rarely true.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by Shakespeare and those others.