It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.

We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.

It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage

A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?

When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.

An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.