The only power a god can teach is the power of doing without happiness.

There is no accomplishment so easy to acquire as politeness and none more profitable.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.

A pornographic novelist is one who exploits the sexual instinct as a prostitute does. A legitimate sex novel elucidates it or brings out its poetry, tragedy, or comedy.

It's not that I'm so clever, it is that others are so stupid.