To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.

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.

I think that instinct, that storytelling instinct, rescued me most of my life.

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.

My mum says, 'Go with your first instinct,' but this can lead to impulse buying!

To be womanly is one thing, and one only; it is to be sensitive to man, to be highly endowed with the sex instinct; to be manly is to be sensitive to woman.

I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.

The instinct to worship is hardly less strong than the instinct to eat.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

Your instinct, rather than precision stabbing, is more about just random bludgeoning.