You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.
Nobody ever died of laughter.
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.
It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.
Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.
The literary gift is a mere accident – is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.
I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.
The lower one’s vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.
The loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see it suddenly eye to eye, at a distance of half an inch from your own.
The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.
Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused.
Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.
I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased – short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.
A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.
People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk.
A man’s work is rather the needful supplement to himself than the outcome of it.
But to die of laughter – this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.
True dandyism is the result of an artistic temperament working upon a fine body within the wide limits of fashion.
I may be old fashioned, but I am right.
Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter freemasonry.