On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners.

We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. living, as you all do, on other and by them, you need at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season.

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.

I don't mind plain women being puritans. It is the only excuse they have for being plain.

Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.