The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.
It is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country.
There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.
A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere is like a cat that goes on playing with a mouse long after she’s killed it.
It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practiced it in a tent.
Once a female, always a female. Nature is not always infallible but she always abides by her mistakes.
The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience; you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.
We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart.
People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes.
All decent people live beyond their incomes; those who aren’t respectable live beyond other people’s; a few gifted individuals manage to do both.
If he had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game. I never know what the big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the destructive energies of some of our social misfits.
It’s no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.
Never be a pioneer. It’s the early Christian that gets the fattest lion.
People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.
Children with Hyacinth’s temperament don’t know better as they grow older; they merely know more.
Life is full of its disappointments, and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions.
When people grow gradually rich their requirements and standard of living expand in proportion, while their present-giving instincts often remain in the undeveloped condition of their earlier days. Something showy and not-too-expensive in a shop is their only conception of the ideal gift.
Great Socialist statesmen aren’t made, they’re still-born.
He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary to invent it.
Why are women so fond of raking up the past? They’re as bad as tailors, who invariably remember what you owe them for a suit long after you’ve ceased to wear it.