This is woman's great benevolence, that she will become a martyr for beauty, so that the world may have pleasure.

The art of writing history is the art of emphasizing the significant facts at the expense of the insignificant. And it is the same in every field of knowledge. Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about.

The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense -- it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream.

Mr. Shaw came for a short time recently to be regarded less as an author than as an incident in the European War. In the opinion of many people it seemed as if the Allies were fighting against a combination composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Mr. Shaw.

Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside.

When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility.

There are travelers who fear to own delicate hands more than to meet a lion, and soldiers who would rather lose a limb than gain a beautiful nose by artificial methods.