... 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.

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.

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.

if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.

I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.

Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin.

When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense.