[D]on't grow old. With age comes caution, which is another name for cowardice.... Whatever else you do in life, don't cultivate a conscience. Without a conscience a man may never be said to grow old. This is an age of very old young men.

The English public doesn't really like Shakespeare; it prefers football.

When people are old enough to know better they are old enough to do worse.

Fate stalks us with depressing monotony from womb to tomb, and, when we are least expecting it, deals us a series of crushing blows from behind.

An author should be delighted, not annoyed when he hears himself persistently misquoted. He could receive no higher compliment. It proves that the world has frequent and urgent need of his thoughts and will rather change the manner in which he expresses them than do without the things expressed.

Do you believe in God? Perhaps you aren't old enough. The reason old people believe in God is because they've given up believing in anything else, and one can't exist without faith in something.... God is a sort of burglar. As a young man you knock him down; as an old man, you try to conciliate him because he may knock you down. Moral: don't grow old.

I am inclined to think that one's education has been in vain if one fails to learn that most schoolmasters are idiots.