Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.

The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.

Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.

The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an Orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them.