Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.
The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.
There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.
Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.
Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.
The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.
No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.
There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love.
No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.
men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.
What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new - yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp.
Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious?
It is not permissible to lie merely to save one's face. But it is sometimes permissible to lie to save another person's face.
On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.
if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.
I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.
The indiscreet questioner - and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man's duty either to the community or to any individual to answer - is a marauder, and there is every excuse for treating him as such.
There are inquiries which are a sort of moral burglary.
... if a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.
We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping.
I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.
The principle of fashion is . . . the principle of the kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin again.
... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.
The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.
democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical.
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