"MRS PEARCE. Mr Higgins: youre tempting the girl. It's not right. She should think of the future.HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you havnt any future to think of."

"You may remember that on earth-though of course we never confessed it-the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them."

"The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car."

"Loyalty in a critic is corruption."

"We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies."

"I never asked to be a king: it was pushed on me. So if you are going to say 'Son of St Louis: gird on the sword of your ancestors, and lead us to victory' you may spare your breath to cool your porridge; for I cannot do it. I am not built that way; and there is an end of it."

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."

"In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win."

"The art of government is the organization of idolatry."

"I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy."

"Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself."

"I'm an atheist and I thank God for it."

"A man never tells you anything until you contradict him."

"A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity."

"Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time."

"My reputation grows with every failure."

"How can she? She's incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?"

"Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none."

"Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it."

"If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion."

"Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity."

"The fickleness of the woman I love is equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me."

"What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults."

"Youth is wasted on the young."

"Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?"

"A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell."

"Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does."

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education."

"Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it...."

"To be in hell is to drift, to be in heaven is to steer."

"Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious."

"He's a man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage."

"You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two, and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could."

"The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself."

"What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts."

"Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad."

"I work as my father drank."

"Use your health even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die do not outlive yourself."

"There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses."

"It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture."

"Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."

"A great devotee of the gospel of getting on."