I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.

An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.