No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.
Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom.
Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.
The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.
It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.
The Expulsion from Eden is an act of vindictive womanish spite; the Fall of Man, as recounted in the Bible, comes nearer to the Fall of God.
The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.
It is a consolation of human life that the sick forget what it is like to feel well, or the miserable to be happy.
The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, – luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, – are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.
Promise is the capacity for letting people down.
A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.
We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.
Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.