"It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality"

"Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter"

"No Roman ever was able to say, `I dined last night with the Borgias'."

"`Ah, say that again,' she murmured. `Your voice is music.' He repeated his question. `Music,' she said dreamily; and such is the force of habit that `I don't,' she added, `know anything about music, really. But I know what I like.'"

"She was one of those people who said ''I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.''"

"You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men."

"A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her."

"The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to bad end"

"Fate wrote her [Queen Caroline] a most tremendous tragedy, and she played it in tights."

"The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all."

"Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge."

". . . but beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied."

"Men of genius are so few that they ought to atone for their fewness by being at any rate ubiquitous."

"To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature"

"Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful"

"There is always something rather absurd about the past"

"People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table"

"You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men."

"No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt"

"I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul"

"There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success."

"You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself"

"Most women are not as young as they are painted."

"Nobody ever died of laughter."

"Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth."

"To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving."