The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone – for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.
Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.
Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.
When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting.
The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life.
And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws.
In the old times men carried out their rights for themselves as they lived, but nowadays every baby seems born with a social manifesto in its mouth much bigger than itself.
Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.
Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.
It is he who has broken the bond of marriage – not I. I only break its bondage.
You know what a woman’s curiosity is.
I don’t like Switzerland; it has produced nothing but theologians and waiters.
As a wicked man I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back.
I won’t belong to a club that accepts me as a member.
All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.
A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime.
Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic – a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.
The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.
Love is a misunderstanding between two fools.
The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.