Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.
The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.
There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.
Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.
Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.
The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.
No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.
There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love.
No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.
men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.
Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit.
Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.
... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.
Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jefferson has really believed it.
democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical.
I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.
if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.
On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.
It is not permissible to lie merely to save one's face. But it is sometimes permissible to lie to save another person's face.
You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one.
The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.
The great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind.
Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.
... the more we recruit from immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about culture, or even know what it is.
Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.
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