Life is full of its disappointments, and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions.

The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside.

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

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

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.

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.