So long as some are strong and some are weak, the weak will be driven to the wall.
There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.
In heaven, when the blessed use the telephone they will say what they have to say and not a word besides.
There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.
If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.
A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.
Dullness is the first requisite of a good husband.
The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect.
There’s nothing the world loves more than a ready-made description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future.
In religion above all things the only thing of use is an objective truth. The only God that is of use is a being who is personal, supreme and good, and whose existence is as certain as that two and two make four.
It must be that to govern a nation you need a specific talent and that this may very well exist without general ability.
Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are; because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.
There is no more merit in being able to attach a correct description to a picture than in being able to find out what is wrong with a stalled motorcar. In each case it is special knowledge.
It takes two to make a love affair and a mans meat is too often a woman’s poison.
Love is not always blind and there are few things that cause greater wretchedness than to love with all your heart someone who you know is unworthy of love.
When a man’s in love, he at once makes a pedestal of the Ten Commandments and stands on the top of them with his arms akimbo. When a woman’s in love she doesn’t care two straws for Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not.
The spirit is often most free when the body is satiated with pleasure; indeed, sometimes the stars shine more brightly seen from the gutter than from the hilltop.
Clearly much that seemed valid seemed so only because he had been taught it from earliest youth.
The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.
It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.