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

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.

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

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

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.

Good ones don’t have time to bother with success or getting rich.

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.

Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.

An excuse which, if carried to its legitimate conclusion, would leave our business men weeping on one another’s shoulders over human frailty, while they picked one another’s pockets.

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green…

The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well.

Most people thought I was a dork. But if you have a sense of humor about it, no one can bring you down.

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it’s such a nice change from being young.