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

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.

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

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

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

Syllables govern the world.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.

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

My reputation grows with every failure.

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

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.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.

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.

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

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

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

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider!

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

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

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

If you're not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can't be of very much use to yourself.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

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

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.