The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?
You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.
We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.
There is a species of person called a ‘Modern Churchman’ who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.
There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.
The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.
When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.
We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.
It is a curious thing… that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
Other nations use ‘force’; we Britons alone use ‘Might’.
One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.
Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in “Old Maid”; the player who is finally left with it has lost.
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.
I haven’t been to sleep for over a year. That’s why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn’t sleep.
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
I put the words down and push them a bit.
I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.
If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.
He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.