I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers at their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever knows. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.

An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

To bear failure with courage is the best proof of character that anyone can give.

By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.

My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

I don't know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.

It is funny about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get it.

A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her...but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.

I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

Tolerance is another word for indifference.

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

There will always be one who loves, and one who lets himself be loved.

The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

It was such a lovely day I thought it was a pity to get up.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

We do not write because we want to we write because we have to.

There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches them tolerance.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.

I do not confer praise or blame I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.

Love is a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up.

He had heard people speak contemptuously of money he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.

When things are at their worst I find something always happens.

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.

It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.

The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.

It's a funny thing about life if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late.

She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.

The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers.

Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present.