Improvisation is the essence of good talk. Heaven defend us from the talker who doles out things prepared for us; but let heaven not less defend us from the beautiful spontaneous writer who puts his trust in the inspiration of the moment.
For people who like that kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like.
To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.
Pessimism does win us great happy moments.
Men prominent in life are mostly hard to converse with. They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn’t like to confront them with their own great themes.
Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.
As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.
Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.
Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn’t been invented yet.
Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man’s footprint.
Not that I had any special reason for hating school. Strange as it may seem to my readers, I was not unpopular there. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends...
Beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied...
The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.
Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.
What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead – so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century.
Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.
It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.
She was one of those people who said I don’t know anything about music, but I know what I like.
Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect, either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.