How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!
I might give my life for my friend, but he had better not ask me to do up a parcel.
I am one of the unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die, in constant ratios.
We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.
I can’t forgive my friends for dying; I don’t find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
Don’t tell friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.
It’s an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right.
How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.
If they lost the incredible conviction that they can change their wives or husbands, marriage would collapse at once.
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there isn’t a God.
The ladies who try to keep their beauty are the ladies who lose it.
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.
Thank heavens, the sun has gone in and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?
All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil’s traps for artists.
Only those who get into scrapes with their eyes open can find the safe way out.
The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection -even though nothing more than the pounding of an old piano -is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.