Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

Those obsessed with health are not healthy; the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself.

Maturity begins when we're content to feel we're right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong.

When we have "second thoughts" about something, our first thoughts don't seem like thoughts at all - just feelings.

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.

Nice things are done for our own sake, not for the sake of others. The pleasure must reside in the performance, not in the applause. Good deeds are, in a deeper psychological way, a favor to oneself. If this is not grasped, then our whole sense of personal relationships becomes warped.