M. E. W. Sherwood Quotes

If you should put a knife into a French girl's learning it would explode and blow away like an omelette soufflee.

In the early forties and fifties almost everybody "had about enough to live on," and young ladies dressed well on a hundred dollars a year. The daughters of the richest man in Boston were dressed with scrupulous plainness, and the wife and mother owned one brocade, which did service for several years. Display was considered vulgar. Now, alas! only Queen Victoria dares to go shabby.

Holland is a land of intense paradox. It is quite impossible, but it is there.

This habit of free speaking at ladies' lunches has impaired society; it has doubtless led to many of the tragedies of divorce and marital unhappiness. Could society be deaf and dumb and Congress abolished for a season, what a happy and peaceful life one could lead!

Washington society has always demanded less and given more than any society in this country--demanded less of applause, deference,etiquette, and has accepted as current coin quick wit, appreciative tact, and a talent for talking.

War is a most uneconomical, foolish, poor arrangement, a bloody enrichment of that soil which bears the sweet flower of peace.

It is better to pay court to a queen ... than to worship, as we too often do, some unworthy person whose wealth is his sole passport into society. I believe that a habit of respect is good for the human race.

The American is said to become full-flavored, and in time a most all-round man, through the polish which Europe can impart.

Westminster Abbey is nature crystallized into a conventional form by man, with his sorrows, his joys, his failures, and his seeking for the Great Spirit. It is a frozen requiem, with a nation's prayer ever in dumb music ascending.

If there is anything so romantic as that castle-palace-fortress of Monaco I have not seen it. If there is anything more deliciousthan the lovely terraces and villas of Monte Carlo I do not wish to see them. There is nothing beyond the semi-tropical vegetation, the projecting promontories into the Mediterranean, the all-embracing sweep of the ocean, the olive groves, and the enchanting climate! One gets tired of the word beautiful.

To look at and properly appreciate the British Museum is the work of a lifetime.

Rome, like Washington, is small enough, quiet enough, for strong personal intimacies; Rome, like Washington, has its democratic court and its entourage of diplomatic circle; Rome, like Washington, gives you plenty of time and plenty of sunlight. In New York we have annihilated both.

... anything so delightful as Washington I have never seen elsewhere. There were a mingled simplicity and grandeur, a mingled state and quiet intimacy, a brilliancy of conversation--the proud prominence of intellect over material prosperity which does not exist in any other city of the Union.

The poor are always ragged and dirty, in very picturesque clothes, and on their poor shoes lies the earth of the Lacustrine period. And yet what a privilege it is to be even a beggar in Rome!

... the English are very fond of being entertained, and ... they regard the French and the American people as destined by Heaven to amuse them.

The House of Lords, architecturally, is a magnificent room, and the dignity, quiet, and repose of the scene made me unwillingly acknowledge that the Senate of the United States might possibly improve its manners. Perhaps in our desire for simplicity, absence of title, or badge of office we may have thrown over too much.

I should say tact was worth much more than wealth as a road to leadership.... I mean that subtle apprehension which teaches a person how to do and say the right thing at the right time. It coexists with very ordinary qualities, and yet many great geniuses are without it. Of all human qualities I consider it the most convenient--not always the highest; yet I would rather have it than many more shining qualities.

I did not find Liverpool ugly. Her stately public buildings, broad streets, public squares, and noble statues redeem her from the charge.

People who live in quiet, remote places are apt to give good dinners. They are the oft-recurring excitement of an otherwise unemotional, dull existence. They linger, each of these dinners, in our palimpsest memories, each recorded clearly, so that it does not blot out the others.

How often the Presidency has simply meant that a man shall be abused, distrusted, and worked to death while he is filling the great office, and that he should drop into unmerited oblivion when he has left the White House.

The young women, what can they not learn, what can they not achieve, with Columbia University annex thrown open to them? In this great outlook for women's broader intellectual development I see the great sunburst of the future.

...I think the Americans are the only people who have good beds. I consider the American bedroom unparalleled for freshness, comfort, and cleanliness. It is worth going all over Europe in order to come home to one's own bed.

... too many young painters of the day work for the crowd, and not for art. But, then, should not the painters of the day work for the education of the crowd?

English people ... are very kind, very friendly, interested in a general way, and consider us a great, wonderful, unknown sort of Australia, and that is all.