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.
Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.
Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.
The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.
men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.
There are inquiries which are a sort of moral burglary.
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.
Each man's private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess.
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.
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.
Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious?
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.
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.
Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites of truth.
For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement.
The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?
[Science] has challenged the super-eminence of religion; it has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend on it; and it has bribed the skeptics by giving us immense material comforts.
Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin.
All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.
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