The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.

My opportunities were still there, nay, they multiplied tenfold; but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail, and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience.

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.

The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.