Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.

men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.

It is not permissible to lie merely to save one's face. But it is sometimes permissible to lie to save another person's face.

The principle of fashion is . . . the principle of the kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin again.

I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.

The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.

Educational legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a reproach on them.