The salesman knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

There’s nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It’s a thing no married man knows anything about.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.