No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.

The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.

Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong

People must have both their dreams and their dinners in this world, and when we go out of it we must take what we find. That is all.

For although this was a very heroic war, with a parade of every sort of high moral principle, and with the most sonorous language employed upon both sides, it somehow failed to bring about either the reformation or the ruin of humankind: and after the conclusion of the murdering and general breakage, the world went on pretty much as it has done after all other wars, with a vague notion that a deal of time and effort had been unprofitably invested, and a conviction that it would be inglorious to say so.

The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills — and as immortal.

In what else, pray, does man differ from the other animals except in that he is used by words?