Marriage is a long, dull meal with dessert served at the beginning.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame.

The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.

But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.

The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.

A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime.