... if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

There are inquiries which are a sort of moral burglary.

Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly.

... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.

The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.