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

People of small calibre are always carping. How affected so-and-so is! Don't you think he is silly? He was certainly quite mistaken about this or that. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or their prowess or good breeding.

Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.

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

Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.

No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.