Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.

The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.

The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.

Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.

Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.