He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.
No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.
If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman, he may pronounce as he pleases.
Morality is not respectability.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.
Englishmen never will be slaves; they are free to do whatever the government and public opinion allow them to do.
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty to do.
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
The philosopher is Nature's pilot - and there you have our difference; to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
Common sense is instinct Enough of it is genius.
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.
It is assumed that the woman must wait motionless until she is wooed. That is how the spider waits for the fly.
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
A soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid.
What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattery.
I enjoy convalescence .It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
The whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.
If you go to heaven without being naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy it there.
All great truths began as blasphemies.
Success covers a multitude of blunders.
The best brought - up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parents' first duty.
Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
He knows nothing; he thinks he knows everything - that clearly points to a political career.
The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness, for it is ever imposed in the interests of the children.
A life spend making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.
Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.
When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age, ask them how they would like to life in a stationary one, and do without change.
Beauty is a short - lived tyranny.
I believe in the discipline of silence and could talk for hours about it.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.
Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world; but you must get at a man through his own religion, not through yours.
My only policy is to profess evil and to good.
Happiness and beauty are by - products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.
The fickleness of the woman I love is equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way.
When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. i didn't want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work.
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
Better keep yourself clear and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty - stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
A great devotee of the gospel of getting on.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
I work as my father drank.
A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.
He who can does. He who can't, teaches.
The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.
An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
This is true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap.
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
Never resist temptation; prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the mount.
The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.
Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.
Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
I am only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller.
All professions are a conspiracy against the country.
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. the people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
Self - denial is not a virtue, it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
A pessimist? A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
A learned man is a idler who kills time by study.
Self - control is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive.
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
Most people do not pray; they only beg.
It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that, to break a man's spirit is devil's work.
I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
I am a millionaire. That is my religion.
The art of government is the organization of idolatry.
Woman's dearest delight is to wound Man's self - conceit, though Man's dearest delight is to gratify hers.
You don't learn to hold your own by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.
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