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

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.

Looking at the poems of John Gray when I saw the tiniest rivulet of text meandering through the very largest meadow of margin,

She could carry off anything; and some people said that she did.

It is all very well to say that children are happier with mud pies and rag dolls than with these elaborate delights.

Thou canst not serve both cod and salmon.

She suspected him of infidelity, with and without reason, morning, noon and night.

A morbid propensity that causes great suffering in domestic life is often curiously infectious to the very person for whom it creates most suffering.

When I see a cheerful young man shrieking about how full of life he is, banging on a drum, and blowing on a tin trumpet, and speaking of his good spirits

There may be something in this theory, but when their amusements are carried to such a point of luxurious and imaginative perfection it certainly gives them great and even unlimited enjoyment at the time.

Many women I know think the ideal of happiness is to be in love with a great man, or to be the wife of a great public success; to share his triumph! They forget you share the man as well!

I suggested to Oscar Wilde that he should go a step further than these minor poets; he should publish a book all margin; full of beautiful, unwritten thoughts.

People were not charmed with Eglantine because she herself was charming, but because she was charmed.

Most people now seem to treasure anything they value in proportion to the extent that it’s followed about and surrounded by the vulgar public.

Al Qaeda doesn’t abide by the Geneva Conventions, so in my opinion, they should not be afforded the protections of them.

Tis done. We have become a nation.

Thus, anybody who follows this nature and gives way its states will be led into quarrels and conflicts, and go against the conventions and rules of society, and will end up a criminal.

People think one-point and two-point perspective is how the world actually looks, but of course, it isn’t. It’s a convention.

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

Sanity lies somewhere between the inhibitions of conventional morality and the looseness of extreme impulse, but the area in-between is very fuzzy.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

I personally prefer freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you’re ground down by convention. You can’t think as you like and you can’t act as you like. That’s because it’s a democratic nation. I expect America’s worse.