The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.

invaders always destroy libraries.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him -- to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.