Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.

Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.

For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.

... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.