Great artists are modest almost as seldom as they are faithful to their wives.
Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them.
Change is not progress.
The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.
History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.
The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by polygamy.
The priest, realistically considered, is the most immoral of men, for he is always willing to sacrifice every other sort of good to the one good of his arcanum – the vague body of mysteries that he calls the truth.
Why do men go to zoos?
The scent of frying astronomers long ago ceased to ascend to Yahweh.
Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
The Book of Revelation has all the authority, in these theological uplands, of military orders in time of war. The people turn to it for light upon all their problems, spiritual and secular.
The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man – say a Tennessee Holy Roller – is really very small.
Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries – as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them – but because it was far more poetical.
Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.
Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.