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.

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

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

There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love.

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 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.

if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.