Hector Hugh Munro Quotes

The revenge of an elder sister may be long in coming, but, like a South-Eastern express, it arrives in its own good time.

Mother, may I go and maffick, Tear around and hinder traffic?

To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.

I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.

He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.

Monogamy is the Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.

Women and elephants never forget an injury.

The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.

He seems the incarnation of everything soft and silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let sleep.

His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect.

Never be a pioneer. It's the early Christian that gets the fattest lion.

If he had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game. I never know what the big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the destructive energies of some of our social misfits.

I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.

There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.

Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world.

Find yourself a cup; the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things.

Oysters are more beautiful than any religion... There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.

When people grow gradually rich their requirements and standard of living expand in proportion, while their present-giving instincts often remain in the undeveloped condition of their earlier days. Something showy and not-too-expensive in a shop is their only conception of the ideal gift.

I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.

Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.

It's no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.

And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.

It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.

The cat is domestic only as far as suits its own ends.

I hate posterity - it's so fond of having the last word.

A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere is like a cat that goes on playing with a mouse long after she's killed it.

Why are women so fond of raking up the past? They're as bad as tailors, who invariably remember what you owe them for a suit long after you've ceased to wear it.

There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.

I believe I once considerably scandalized her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience.

In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.

He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary to invent it.

You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.

Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're still-born.

The man is a common murderer. A common murderer, possible, but a very uncommon cook.

There is no easy in the world neither hard everything is the same in a way.

Addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts.

It is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country.

People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes.

We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart.

All decent people live beyond their incomes; those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's; a few gifted individuals manage to do both.

He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.

On horseback he seemed to require as many hands as a Hindu god, at least four for clutching the reins, and two more for patting the horse soothingly on the neck.

The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.

Children with Hyacinth's temperament don't know better as they grow older; they merely know more.