The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.

The miser is the man who starves himself, and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and violinist.

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, "charm" "spell," "enchantment" They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.