Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.
I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.
Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.
I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn’t a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me – I actually took my teachers seriously!
Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?
There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.
You have more people that love you than you know.
In everything was the spirit of children’s play – not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.
To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.
There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.
It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.
Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?
Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.
Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.
That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.
Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays ’em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera – or war or fiction.
Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life’s dark clouds.
It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.
Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
I love America, but I don’t like it.