Hector Hugh Munro Quotes

A beautifully constructed borshch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought.

The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.

Children are given us to discourage our better emotions.

No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.

It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practiced it in a tent.

Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.

People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.

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

Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.

I always say beauty is only sin deep.

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.

Romance at short notice was her speciality.

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.

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.

Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.

Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage.

I hate babies. They're so human.

There are certain fixed rules that one observes for one's own comfort. For instance, never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden.

Once a female, always a female. Nature is not always infallible but she always abides by her mistakes.