When a man's in love, he at once makes a pedestal of the Ten Commandments and stands on the top of them with his arms akimbo. When a woman's in love she doesn't care two straws for Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not.

The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]

A state of reverie does not avoid reality, it accedes to reality.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure--if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence.

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.