Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.

I might give my life for my friend, but he had better not ask me to do up a parcel.

The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.

Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.

Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there isn't a God.

We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.

Don't tell friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.

There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.

If we shake hands with icy fingers, it is because we have burnt them so horribly before.

Don't let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.

What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?

It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.

Many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!

I can't forgive my friends for dying; I don't find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.

A friend who loved perfection would be the perfect friend, did not that love shut his door on me.

The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.

There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets.

Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.

All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares if there seemed any danger of their coming true!

Don't laugh at youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.

The mere process of growing old together will make our slightest acquaintances seem like bosom friends.

What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?

There is one thing that matters, to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

I find a fascination, like the fascination for the moth of a star, in those who hold aloof and disdain me.

People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.

Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them.

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.

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.

Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.

When we say we are certain so-and-so can't possibly have done it, what we mean is that we think he very likely did.

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.

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

If they lost the incredible conviction that they can change their wives or husbands, marriage would collapse at once.

A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.

So, I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents.

It's an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right.

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?

Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each others fur.

It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each others stories; for it they did not, they would burst.

Money and sex are forces too unruly for our reason; they can only be controlled by taboos with which we tamper at our peril.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

All our lives we are putting pennies — our most golden pennies — into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.

Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors, or to see themselves as others see them.

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.

When elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at last real conversation begins, and life is delicious.

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