The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.

The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.

Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.

Educational legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a reproach on them.

There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.

Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.

Nothing makes people so worthy of compliments as receiving them. One is more delightful for being told one is delightful-just as one is more angry for being told one is angry.

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.

All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.

You can bear anything if it is not your fault.

The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.

art, n. This word has no definition.

We all learn by experience, and your lesson this time is that you should never lose sight of the alternative. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.

It's hard to answer a question you haven't been asked. It's hard to show you tried unless you end up succeeding.

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

It, sometimes, suits the slaveholders to claim, that their slavery is an exclusively State concern; and that the North has, therefore, nothing to do with it.

I knew Bob Dylan was searching for the truth and had been for years. And anyone who Really wants the truth ends up at Jesus

Knowing the steps to create living growth: that is art.

Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality-thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard.

Pan me, don't give me the part, publish everybody's book but this one and I will still make it!