Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.