Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.
"After all," as a pretty girl once said to me, "women are a sex by themselves, so to speak."
We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans.
The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.
The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it.
She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.
Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.
It distresses me, this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought, as they pass into oblivion.
People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk.
To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.
Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.
To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.
The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
Sometimes I feel that I am a natural born genius in a field of human endeavor that hasn't been invented yet
You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.
True dandyism is the result of an artistic temperament working upon a fine body within the wide limits of fashion.
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.
Of course we all know that Morris was a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.
Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.
To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.
As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.
Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.
It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.
It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter.
Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused.
What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century
The loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see it suddenly eye to eye, at a distance of half an inch from your own.
You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect, either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.
Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.
A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.
By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.
I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased - short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.
There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are reasonably expected to go.
Men prominent in life are mostly hard to converse with. They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn't like to confront them with their own great themes.
Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.
It is so much easier to covet what one hasn't than to revel in what one has. Also, it is so much easier to be enthusiastic about what exists than about what doesn't.
Have you noticed ... there is never any third act in a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there. They are the work of poor dramatists.
There is much virtue in a window. It is to a human being as a frame is to a painting, as a proscenium to a play, as 'form' to literature. It strongly defines its content.
Not that I had any special reason for hating school. Strange as it may seem to my readers, I was not unpopular there. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.
Reverence is a good thing, and part of its value is that the more we revere a man, the more sharply are we struck by anything in him (and there is always much) that is incongruous with his greatness.
It is a part of English hypocrisy or English reserve, that whilst we are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences, we insist on making light of any great difficulties or grief's that may beset us.
The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment in the most beautiful manner.
Improvisation is the essence of good talk. Heaven defend us from the talker who doles out things prepared for us; but let heaven not less defend us from the beautiful spontaneous writer who puts his trust in the inspiration of the moment.
In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant of character that one might as well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.
Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me? I protest that I do still, at the age of forty-seven, laugh often and loud and long. But not, I believe, so long and loud and often as in my less smiling youth. And I am proud, nowadays, of laughing, and grateful to any one who makes me laugh. That is a bad sign. I no longer take laughter as a matter of course.
For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of the next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is the sun's bright message to him, and "Why not indeed?" his answer.