Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.
The most interesting persons are always those who have nothing special to do: children, nurses, policemen and actors at 11 o’clock in the morning.
One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings.
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
There are certain people whom one feels almost inclined to urge to hurry up and die so that their letters can be published.
Men talk of “finding God,” but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden in that darkest hiding-place, your heart. You yourself are a part of Him.
Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities.
Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns, and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.
The plural of spouse is spice.
Beware of the conversationalist who adds “in other words.” He is merely starting afresh.
The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books.
Being in a hurry seems so fiercely important when you yourself are the hurrier and so comically ludicrous when it is someone else.
Fifty percent of the world are women, yet they always seem a novelty.
A mind too proud to unbend over the small ridiculosa of life is as painful as a library with no trash in it.
Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.
The censure of a dog is something no man can stand.
How womanly it is to ask the unanswerable at the moment impossible.
Never write up your diary on the day itself, for it takes longer than that to know what happened.
The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer’s ink is the greater explosive: it will win.
Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a ‘good’ book. A book is ‘good’ only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.