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

In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.

Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

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

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.