It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable grounds.
To live is like to love: all reason is against it and all healthy instinct is for it.
Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence.
Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes.
They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'
The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
The advantage of doing one's praising to oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
Man unlike the animal has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.
Life is one long process of getting tired.
People are lucky and unlucky ... according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.
If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.
One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten and to leave off fighting at once.
A lawyer's dream of heaven - every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.
A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.
Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.
