for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.

I have known men who have been sold and bought a hundred times, who have only got very fat and very comfortable in the process of exchange.

I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.

In its permission to man to render subject to him all other living creatures of the earth, it continued the cruelty of the barbarian and the pagan, and endowed these with what appeared a divine authority.

Sport inevitably creates deadness of feeling. No one could take pleasure in it who was sensitive to suffering; and therefore its pursuit by women is much more to be regretted than its pursuit by men, because women pursue much more violently and recklessly what they pursue at all.

A little scandal is an excellent thing; nobody is ever brighter or happier of tongue than when he is making mischief of his neighbors.