Hector Hugh Munro Quotes - Page 2

To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.

Addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts.

Find yourself a cup; the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things.

Monogamy is the Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.

It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.

It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practiced it in a tent.

Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.

Oysters are more beautiful than any religion... There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.

The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside.

Children are given us to discourage our better emotions.

Hating anything in the way of ill-natured gossip ourselves, we are always grateful to those who do it for us and do it well.

You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.

He seems the incarnation of everything soft and silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let sleep.

I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.

Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're still-born.

I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.

Once a female, always a female. Nature is not always infallible but she always abides by her mistakes.

To be among people who are smothered in furs when one hasn't any oneself makes one want to break most of the Commandments.

Every reformation must have its victims. You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return.

And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.

There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.

I believe I once considerably scandalized her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience.

Why are women so fond of raking up the past? They're as bad as tailors, who invariably remember what you owe them for a suit long after you've ceased to wear it.

On horseback he seemed to require as many hands as a Hindu god, at least four for clutching the reins, and two more for patting the horse soothingly on the neck.