Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us..

Once you have a point of view all history will back you up..

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible..

Better the fragrant herb of wit and a little cream of affability than all the pretty cups in the world..

If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?.

No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been l….

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman..

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water..

It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans..

How delightful is the company of generous people, who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in t….

The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses..

People of small calibre are always carping. How affected so-and-so is! Don't you think he is silly? He was certainly quite mistaken about this or tha….

A man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man. The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an orphic manner what everybody….

The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes..

Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find….

As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day..

Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side..

The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an Orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them..

There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the po….

The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man..

Nothing is sadder than the consequences of having worldly standards without worldly means..