You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.

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.

The stock actor is a stage calamity