Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can bear anything if it is not your fault.
All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.
There are inquiries which are a sort of moral burglary.
The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.
The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.
Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.
Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit.
The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.
Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin.
There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love.
The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.
Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.
Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.
Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and may not marry.
men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.
Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.
For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement.
Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give.
... if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season.
Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.
if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.
Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jefferson has really believed it.
It is not permissible to lie merely to save one's face. But it is sometimes permissible to lie to save another person's face.
When did the word 'temperament' come into fashion with us? Perhaps it came in when we discovered that artists were human beings.
No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.
The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.
I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.
I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative.
When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense.
What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new - yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp.
democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical.
Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude.
Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious?
One of the reasons, surely, why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them.
... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.
There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.
Educational legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a reproach on them.
Nothing makes people so worthy of compliments as receiving them. One is more delightful for being told one is delightful-just as one is more angry for being told one is angry.
Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.
Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.
The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none, for a man cannot be said to be"on the side of the stars" at all, unless he makes refusals.
The principle of fashion is . . . the principle of the kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin again.
On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.
Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites of truth.
I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.
I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.
The great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind.
The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. You could ignore a subject; no subject is all-inclusive. But a method can plausibly be applied to anything within the field of consciousness.
You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one.
The indiscreet questioner - and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man's duty either to the community or to any individual to answer - is a marauder, and there is every excuse for treating him as such.