A sin takes on a new and real terror when there seems a chance that it is going to be found out.

Just because you’re taught that something’s right and everyone believes it’s right, it don’t make it right.

Cats are the wildest of the tame and the tamest of the wild

Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.

Nevertheless we have this curious spectacle: daily the trained parrot in the pulpit gravely delivers himself of these ironies, which he has acquired at second-hand and adopted without examination, to a trained congregation which accepts them without examination, and neither the speaker nor the hearer laughs at himself. It does seem as if we ought to be humble when we are at a bench-show, and not put on airs of intellectual superiority there.

Human beings seem to be a poor invention. If they are the noblest works of God where is the ignoblest?

Tell the truth or trump-but get the trick.