James Gould Cozzens

“In the last analysis, one must be a military man in order to understand military men.”

“What is called liberality is often only the vanity of giving, of which we are fonder than of what we give.”

“The first business of a man of action is to be quiet.”

“The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.”

“Life is a dream from which we all must wake before we can dream again.”

“Happiness is not a horse, you cannot harness it.”

“The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice, and truth.”

“There is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure—it is, after all, what everybody does all the time.”

“A man who is not a fool is a fool.”

“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

“Every man is the basis of a coming revolution.”

“Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”