There’s so much spring in the air- there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.
You have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without conscience, you are just one of many thousand journalists.
Happiness is the relief after extreme tension.
The men – the undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country.
I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.
To most women art is a form of scandal.
The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes-but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better.
Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering.
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you.
Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.
The sign of intelligence is the ability to carry opposed thoughts at the same time.
Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.
The world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility.
This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.
Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.
Fairies: Nature’s attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.
Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them – their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.
The two basic stories of all times are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer-the charm of women and the courage of men.
Optimism is the content of small men in high places.
It was strange to have no self-to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.