"Science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating ten more."

"I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten."

"Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder."

"You cannot be a hero without being a coward."

"No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious."

"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation."

"Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so."

"Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it."

"Some men see things as they are and say, ''Why?'' I of dream things that never were, and say, ''Why not?''"

"Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."

"Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability."

"The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them."

"The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing."

"A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out."

"It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace."

"Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health."

"A pessimist thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it."

"We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it."

"Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life."

"The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man."

"Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not."

"When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work."

"You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live."

"You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul."

"Syllables govern the world."

"The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post."

"Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles."

"There is no love sincerer than the love of food."

"This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making yo"

"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!"

"The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me."

"The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it."

"The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people."

"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."

"There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot."

"Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying."

"Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none."

"We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money."

"What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts."

"When I was young I observed that nine out of every ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work."

If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman’s pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog.