The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.

The Church is a house with a hundred gates: and no two men enter at exactly the same angle

Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.

It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.

Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is always dishonest.

You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.

The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.