At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.
From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley.
The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account.
Love is what happens to men and women who don’t know each other.
You cannot write unless you write much.
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.
To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give.
Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.
The best style is the style you don’t notice.
You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.
Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.
Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one.
She loved three things – a joke, a glass of wine, and a handsome man.