They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'
The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.
Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.
Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life.
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.
The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.
If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.
Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.
Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.
The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.
All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.
