Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.

Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them.

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.