Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement—discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

Once a change of direction has begun, even though it’s the wrong one, it still tends to clothe itself as thoroughly in the appurtenances of rightness as if it had been a natural all along.

Very strong personalities must confine themselves in mutual conversation to very gentle subjects.

“Well, I guess the children have left for school by this time—I might as well go home.”

It is difficult for young people to live things down. We will tolerate vice, grand larceny and the quieter forms of murder in our contemporaries....but our children's friends must show a blank service record.

Boredom is not an end product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.

The young prince in velvet gathered in lovely domesticity around the queen amid the hush of rich draperies may presently grow up to be Pedro the Cruel or Charles the Mad, but the moment of beauty was there.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.

“I’m glad I’m American,” she said. "Here in Italy 1 feel that everybody’s dead. Carthaginians and old Romans and Moorish pirates and medieval princes with poisoned rings.