The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.Collection: Sad
It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.Collection: Great
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.Collection: Funny
We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.Collection: Funny
What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?Collection: Courage
The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.Collection: Art
How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?Collection: Success
If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.Collection: Funny
Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.Collection: Happiness
The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.Collection: Age
What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.Collection: Communication
There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want, and after that to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world.
We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.
A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.
There is one thing that matters, to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them.
To suppose as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober.
All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.
The mere process of growing old together will make our slightest acquaintances seem like bosom friends.
The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own.
People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.
There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.Collection: Life