If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.

There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning.

...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.