To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.

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.

Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.

The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.

There is, of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that one sometimes needs help with moving the piano.

Destiny is another name for humanity's half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought.

The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.