“Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.”

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them…

I can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.

Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

We possess nothing certainly except the past.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him from error to truth.

Nothing created has ever been able to fill the heart of man. God alone can fill it infinitely.

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.

It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.

In a rich man’s house there is no place to spit but his face.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

Nature offers nothing that can be called this man’s rather than another’s; but under nature everything belongs to all.