For some of us, the soul is resident in the sole, and yearns ceaselessly for light and air and self-expression. Our feet are our very selves. The tou….

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 catless writer is almost inconceivable..

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….

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

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….

If a quick glance back over world history shows us anything, it shows us that war was one of our most universal joys from our earliest beginnings, sa….

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

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….

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….

However long you have a cat and however plainly he lays his life open before you, there is always something hidden, some name he goes by in a place y….

Very few people have no opinions about cats..

Smiting enemies has always been so admired that, unlike medicine or archaeology, it entitled its successful practitioners to become kings, emperors, ….

The United States government, in figuring our gross national product, defines 'durable goods' as anything that will last three years..

The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own..

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

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….

parents needn't bother driving small children around to see the purple mountains' majesties; the children will go right on duking it out in the back ….

Recreational talking is, along with private singing, one of our saddest recent losses. Like singing, talking has become a job for trained professiona….

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….