It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

If you do not say a thing in an irritating way, you may as well not say it at all because people will not trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.

A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.