The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. ….

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones..

When did the word 'temperament' come into fashion with us? Perhaps it came in when we discovered that artists were human beings..

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us..

The indiscreet questioner - and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man's duty either to the community or to any i….

The great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and th….

Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious?.

Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done dest….

Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar..

Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life..

men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it..

The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal..

There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love..

No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires..

There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic t….

The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not..

The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time..

When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense..

No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on other….

Educational legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not ma….

The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth..