One’s own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don’t enjoy, and don’t listen to them.
The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.
We should nourish our souls on the dew of Poesy, and manure them as well.
The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.
But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.
Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.
Eat with the rich, but go to the play with the poor, who are capable of joy.
When we say we are certain so-and-so can’t possibly have done it, what we mean is that we think he very likely did.
It is the dread of something happening, something unknown and dreadful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk from dying out.
Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each others fur.
Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets.
Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.
An improper mind is a perpetual feast.
Don’t let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.
Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.
There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.
What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they’ve taken away?
We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.
Don’t laugh at youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.
The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.