As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.

Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.

So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.

Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.

The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?

Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.

To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.

The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.

Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

In the end, it is our defiance that redeems us. If wolves had a religion – if there was a religion of the wolf – that it is what it would tell us.

The Truth is first rejected. Then finally accepted.

Leaders who aren't conduits are either dams of dry.

Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards.

Eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions god's infinite love.

There is no question we need higher academic standards and at the local level the rigor of the Common Core state standards must be the new minimum in classrooms.

We live as we dream - alone.

Everybody needs four things in life: Something to do, someone to love, someone to believe in and something to hope for.

America is less safe today than it was the day that Barack Obama became President of the United States. It's absolutely inarguable.

Hoping they bury me with ammunition, weed, and shells. Just in case.