Every reformation must have its victims. You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return.

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.

But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.

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.

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'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.