"The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown."

"No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare."

"Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men."

"Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence."

"Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

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

"No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism."

"In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness."

"The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes."

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

"He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it."

"Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty."

"Happiness and Beauty are by-products."

"In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will."

"Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices."

"Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty."

"Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality."

"Beware of the man whose god is in the skies."

"There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones."

"It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system."

"When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater."

"Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it..."

"Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it..."

"No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means; and I have no reason to hope that Mr Coote may be an exception to the rule."

"My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity."

"Die Walküre is endured by the average man because it contains four scenes for which he would sit out a Scotch sermon, or even a House of Commons debate. These are the love duet in the first act, Brunnhilde's announcement of death in the second, the ride of the Valkyries and the 'fire-charm' in the third. For them the ordinary playgoer endures hours of Wotan, with Christopher Sly's prayer in his heart. 'Would 'twere over!' Now, I am one of those elect souls who are deeply moved by Wotan. I grant you that as a long-winded, one-eyed gentleman backing a certain champion in a fight and henpecked out of his fancy because his wife objects to the moral character of the champion, he is a dreary person indeed . . . but to one who has understood all its beauties, its lofty aspirations, its tragedy, there is nothing trivial, nothing tedious in Die Walküre."

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

"I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer."

"We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners."

"The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life."

"My specialty is being right when other people are wrong."

"I had not achieved a success; but I provoked an uproar; and the sensation was so agreeable that I resolved to try again."

"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."

"Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that. Why should I be filthy and inhuman? Why should I be an accomplice in the wholesale horror and degradation of the slaughter-house?"

"I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self. In the case of a work which is a mere exhibition of skill in conventional art, there may be some excuse for the delusion that the longer the artist works on it the nearer he will bring it to perfection. Yet even the victims of this delusion must see that there is an age limit to the process, and that though a man of forty-five may improve the workmanship of a man of thirty-five, it does not follow that a man of fifty-five can do the same. When we come to creative art, to the living word of a man delivering a message to his own time, it is clear that any attempt to alter this later on is simply fraud and forgery. As I read the old Quintessence of Ibsenism I may find things that I see now at a different angle, or correlate with so many things then unnoted by me that they take on a different aspect. But though this may be a reason for writing another book, it is not a reason for altering an existing one."

"Just as the liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent."

"The salvation of the world depends on the men who will not take evil good-humouredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him."

"It's well to be off with the Old Woman before you're on with the New."

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

"The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel."

"People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them."

"There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses."

"I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On."

"You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub."

"Oh, you are a very poor soldier — a chocolate cream soldier!"

"I never apologize."

"You're not a man, you're a machine."

"Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar! I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day's deed, and think my night's thought."