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

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 political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few.

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.

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

How delightful is the company of generous people, who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in the world about them. People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding. But 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 it everywhere.

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

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.

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.

Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.

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