Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.

Olive Schreiner is less a woman than a geographical fact. Just as one thinks of Egypt as a foreground for the Pyramids, so South Africa seems the setting of that warm, attractive, aggressive personality. Her work is far inferior to her.

Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.

Unfortunately, all gatherings convened for the betterment of the human lot show a tendency to gas themselves, and not with laughing-gas either.

If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'