By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.

Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.

But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting. Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu.

When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.

You're beginning to dislike me, aren't you? Well, dislike me. It doesn't make any difference to me now.

She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.” Waddington, smiling, translated the question. “She says I’m good.” “As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.

Unconsciously, perhaps, we treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence.