Give children beauty, not the record of bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls, as they call history, or of the latitude and longitude of places nobody cares to visit, as they call geography.

If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

...The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.

Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But... it is better to be good than to be ugly.

I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.