“It's a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world's greatest catastrophe. For it means the fall of Western Europe, as it fell in the fourth century. It recurs to me every November, and culminates every December. I have to get over it as I can, and hide, for fear of being sent to an asylum.”

“You say that love is nonsense.... I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.”

“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”

“The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.”

“Every mane should have a fair sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friend.”

“No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.”

“Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.”