"We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!"

"This is the true joy in life - being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one."

"The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die."

"Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation."

"What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness."

"The golden rule is that there are no golden rules."

"In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it."

"Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad."

"If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race."

"It is most unwise for people in love to marry."

"There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage."

"What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?"

"The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it."

"Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first."

"An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable."

"The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is."

"Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married."

"The nations morals are like its teeth, the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them."

"Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal."

"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."