It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.