“Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them.”
“There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.”
“Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.”
“A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.”
“We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.”
“All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.”
“What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?”
“That we should practice what we preach is generally admitted; but anyone who preaches what he and his hearers practice must incur the gravest moral disapprobation.”
“Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.”
“Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.”
“The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people. To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober.”