Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.
Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.
Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.
If any religion had a chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.
The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.
The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.
What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.
He who has never hoped can never despair.
The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
I don’t know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum.
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.