The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.
It is tact that is golden, not silence.
I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living organism – better dead than dying.
You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing.
Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.
Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime.
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage – but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.
Mr. Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he wisely refrains from saying whether they are good or bad things.
Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.
Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.
Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.
There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.
People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.