Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.
There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.
One’s past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.
In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.
Now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.
In married life three is company and two none.
It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.
The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.
There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.
I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.
Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself.
Millionaire models are rare enough; but, by Jove, model millionaires are rarer still!
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.