How often could things be remedied by a word. How often is it left unspoken.
You can construct the character of a man and his age not only from what he does and says, but from what he fails to say and do.
Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.
How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one’s senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.
Why always “not yet”? Do flowers in spring say “not yet”?
Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.
Never take a solemn oath. People think you mean it.
One can always trust to time. Insert a wedge of time and nearly everything straightens itself out.
Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague.
He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity – a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation.
Wine is a precarious aphrodisiac, and its fumes have blighted many a mating.
It takes a wise man to handle a lie, a fool had better remain honest.
The secret of happiness is curiosity.
There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.
The business of life is to enjoy oneself; everything else is a mockery.
You can cram a truth into an epigram – the truth, never.
I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.
It seldom pays to be rude. It never pays to be only half-rude.
A man who is stingy with saffron is capable of seducing his own grandmother.
What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? But the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot go far wrong.