Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.
Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.
In the history of mankind, fanaticism has caused more harm than vice.
The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.
There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.
One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.
Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.
Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.
The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.
On any morning these days whole segments of the population wake up to find themselves famous, while, to keep matters shipshape, whole contingents of celebrities wake up to find themselves forgotten.
The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.
Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.
The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.
If it is the great delusion of moralists to suppose that all previous ages were less sinful than their own, then it is the great delusion of intellectuals to suppose that all previous ages were less sick.
The fascinating necessarily tends to call a certain attention to itself; the interesting need not. An evening spent with a fascinating person leaves vivid memories; one spent with interesting people has merely a sort of bouquet.
On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit. Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.
Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.
In art, there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts.
A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.
She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.
Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.
Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.
In general, American social life constitutes an evasion of talking to people. Most Americans don't, in any vital sense, get together; they only do things together.
For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance.
Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.
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