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 f….

Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit..

I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour t….

Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious?.

The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth..

men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it..

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones..

Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done dest….

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 t….

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

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

There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love..

Educational legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not ma….

When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense..

The great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and th….

Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar..

The indiscreet questioner - and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man's duty either to the community or to any i….

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

The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. ….

No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on other….

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..