Thank you for inviting me to your house, but I prefer to dine in the Greek restaurant at Wabash Avenue and 12th Street where I will be limited to finding dead flies in my soup.

For me, poetry is an impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.

H. L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H. L. Mencken - there is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.

Words are soldiers of fortune hired by different ideas.

Reality is a formless lure, And only when we know this Do we dare to be unreal.

Time is but a phantom dagger That motion lifts to slay itself.

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.

Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?

A residual sea of symbols which is shared by all mankind, usually accessed through dreams or altered states, and from which cultures draw images on which to found their religions.

Probably the most profound thing in the Bible is 'Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.' This is what, to me, is the essence of Christianity.

So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them.

Where reverence is, there is fear; for he who has a feeling of reverence and shame about the commission of any action, fears and is afraid of an ill reputation.

Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.

Thunder only happens when it's raining.

A wise and good man will turn examples of all sorts to his own advantage. The good he will make his patterns, and strive to equal or excel them. The bad he will by all means avoid.

There is something in meanness which excites a species of resentment that never subsides, and something in cruelty which stirs up the heart to the highest agony of human hatred.

The good you have done, the kind words you have spoken, the love you have shown to others, can never be fully measured.