Are you seeing a psychiatrist?' as a conversation opener would nowadays earn you a punch in the nose, but for fifty years it was a compliment. It mea….

The larger the ego, the less the need for other egos around. The more modest, humble, and self-effacing we feel, the more we suffer from solitude, fe….

Once considered an art form that called for talent, or at least a craft that called for practice, a poem now needs only sincerity. Everyone, we're as….

In civilized places idleness, once the prerequisite for abstract thought, poetry, religion, philosophy, and falling in love, has become a character f….

In a proper pub everyone there is potentially, if not a lifelong friend, at least someone to lure into an argument about foreign policy or the Red So….

Exercise, to qualify at all, must be lonely, painfu, humorless, and boring..

In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents..

Success in war was the only success that counted; failure was a disgrace to be wiped out only by starting another war and winning it..

moral indignation is a pleasure, often the only pleasure, in many lives. It's also one of the few pleasures people feel obliged to force on other peo….

Very few people have no opinions about cats..

For the first time in six or seven thousand years, many people of goodwill find themselves confused about art. They want to enjoy it because enjoying….

The thing to remember is that children are temporary. As soon as they develop a sense of humor and get to be good company, maybe even remember to tak….

a woman may be called a wife and mother for most of her life, while a man is called a husband and father only at his funeral..

Almost any dog thinks almost any human is the Great Spirit, the Primal Creator, and the Universal Force Behind the Sun and Tides. What human can resi….

War was ... the chief or maybe the only source of patriotism, and many a politician, from prehistory up to this morning, unified a discontented citiz….

There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!.

Sometimes, with luck, we find the kind of true friend, male or female, that appears only two or three times in a lucky lifetime, one that will winter….

True ownership of anything requires time..

It's curious that throughout our history together, with no apparent effort, people have been able to think of the cat simultaneously as the guardian ….

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition claims that a moderate beer drinker - whatever that means - swallows 11 percent of his dietary protein nee….

In America, snobs who wouldn't be seen dead with a lottery ticket play the stock market. We like to gamble. Winning, we have closed our eyes, leapt a….