Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.

Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made an essential and godliness is regarded as an offence.