Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.
It is good to be on your guard against an Englishman who speaks French perfectly; he is very likely to be a card-sharper or an attache in the diplomatic service.
A good Havana is one of the best pleasures that I know.
Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.
It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.
You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders than to condemn.
Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.
A little smoke lost in the air, that was the life of a man.
A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there’s only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.
Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.
I’ve met so many people, often the scum of the earth, and found them, you know, quite decent. I am an uncomfortable stranger to moral indignation.
For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.
It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.
A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.
There is no object to life. To nature nothing matters but the continuation of the species.
There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.
A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.
The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible.
Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.