Hector Hugh Munro Quotes

It's no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.

Children with Hyacinth's temperament don't know better as they grow older; they merely know more.

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

He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary to invent it.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.

Addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts.

Women and elephants never forget an injury.

The cat is domestic only as far as suits its own ends.

Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.

In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.

Children are given us to discourage our better emotions.

A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere is like a cat that goes on playing with a mouse long after she's killed it.

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.

All decent people live beyond their incomes; those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's; a few gifted individuals manage to do both.

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

He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.

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

No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.

We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart.

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

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.

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

Life is full of its disappointments, and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions.

You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.

I hate babies. They're so human.

Romance at short notice was her speciality.

The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.

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

I hate posterity - it's so fond of having the last word.

Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world.

It is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country.

There is no easy in the world neither hard everything is the same in a way.

People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes.

The man is a common murderer. A common murderer, possible, but a very uncommon cook.

I always say beauty is only sin deep.

A beautifully constructed borshch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought.

It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.

Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage.

I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.

A relative of mine ... spends his time producing improved breeds of sheep and pigs and chickens. So patronising and irritating to teh Almighty, I should think.

The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.

Mother, may I go and maffick, Tear around and hinder traffic?