Tell the cook of this restaurant with my compliments that these are the very worst sandwiches in the whole world, and that, when I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it.
Whenever cannibals are on the brink of starvation, Heaven, in its infinite mercy, sends them a fat missionary.
Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.
However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive.
I never play cricket. It requires one to assume such indecent postures.
The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.
America is one long expectoration.
Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.
The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory.
It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless.
Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her something like a public building.
Self-denial is simply a method by which arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage.
Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilization, more marvelous and more splendid than any that has gone before.
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.