Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.

I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.

Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.

It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.

Nobody ever died of laughter.

You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.

People are either born hosts or born guests.

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.

To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.

No Roman ever was able to say, 'I dined last night with the Borgias'.

No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.

You will find my last words in the blue folder.

The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.

One might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.

There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.

People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.

To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.

A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her.

Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.

As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.

We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans.

It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful.

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.

Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle golden balls.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

Have you ever noticed there is never any third act to a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there.

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.

The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese.

On the other hand, all kinds of adventurous schemes to add security checkpoints to subway and bus systems have been circulating since the London attacks. This is nonsense. No one can guaranty 100 percent security.

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?

Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.