There's nothing so passionate as a vested interest disguised as an intellectual conviction.

Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.

You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea: you can not put an idea up against a barracks-square wall and riddle it with bullets: you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build.

When one has reached 81... one likes to sit back and let the world turn by itself, without trying to push it.

Politics has slain its thousands, but religion has slain its tens of thousands.

Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.

Work! labor the asparagus me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow - security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself.