Charity is a flower not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise of profit.

When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only - What a crib from Rochefoucauld!

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

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.

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.

The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all scorn.

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