Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude.

There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.

No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.

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 past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?

Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin.

What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new - yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp.