What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot enter the kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.

The keeping of an idle woman is a badge of superior social status.

Variety, individuality, peculiarity, eccentricity and indeed crankiness are agreeable to the British mind; they make life more interesting.

A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.

The Devil ... is much better served by exploiting our virtues than by appealing to our lower passions; consequently, it is when the Devil looks most noble and reasonable that he is most dangerous.

If anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle