The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

There is no dunce like a mature dunce.

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.