Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.

God very seldom succeeds. He has very nearly everything against him, of course.

A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.

You should always believe what you read in the newspapers, for that makes them more interesting.

One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And the root problem, beneath a hundred varying manifestions, is How to Escape. How to escape, that is, at those times, be they few or frequent, when you want to keep yourself to yourself.

Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.

Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.