“Fog and hypocrisy – that is to say, shadow, convention, decency – these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance.”

Women are so perverse. Look how they won’t wear black when nothing suits them so well!

The marvellous instinct with which women are usually credited seems too often to desert them on the only occasions when it would be of any real use. One would say it was there for trivialities only

Feminine intuition, a quality perhaps even rarer in women than in men.

A butler in an English household should, however, be English, and as much like an archbishop as possible.

an optimist is the man who looks after your eyes, and the pessimist the person who looks after your feet.

It’s always something to get one’s wish, even if the wish is a failure.

Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.

Since in a crisis they are usually dense, fatally doing the wrong thing. It is hardly too much to say that most domestic tragedies are caused by the feminine intuition of men and the want of it in women.

All really frank people are amusing, and would remain so if they could remember that other people may sometimes want to be frank and amusing too.

As a rule the person found out in a betrayal of love holds, all the same, the superior position of the two. It is the betrayed one who is humiliated.

Everything comes to the man who won’t wait.

Some men are born husbands; they have a passion for domesticity, for a fireside, for a home. Yet, curiously, these men very rarely stay at home. Apparently what they want is to have a place to get away from.

The Futurists?…. Well, of course, they are already past.

It depresses me, since naturally it gives the contrary impression. It can’t be real. It ought to be but it isn’t. If the noisy person meant what he said, he wouldn’t say it.

envy, as a rule, is of success rather than of merit. No one would have objected to his talent deserving recognition – only to his getting it.

To a woman–I mean, a nice woman–there is no such thing as men. There is a man; and either she is so fond of him that she can talk of nothing else, however unfavourably, or so much in love with him that she never mentions his name.

The Buddha’s insight into the middle way is not simply about a balance between extremes. This conventional understanding misses the deeper revelation of the middle way as being the very nature of unexcelled enlightenment.

After four years at the United Nations I sometimes yearn for the peace and tranquility of a political convention.

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

Poetry is a very complex art, It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

Rap is really just too conventional. Everybody does the same thing. No one ever pushes the box.

I think it’s ridiculous that you need to look a certain way to be conventionally pretty.

A guy walks into a psychologist’s convention with a banana in his pocket.When asked about the significance of this he says;well,they were all out of grapes.