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.

Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.

Addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts.

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.

Women and elephants never forget an injury.

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

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.

Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.

He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.

Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.

Children are given us to discourage our better emotions.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.

You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.

I hate babies. They're so human.

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.

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.

Romance at short notice was her speciality.

When people grow gradually rich their requirements and standard of living expand in proportion, while their present-giving instincts often remain in the undeveloped condition of their earlier days. Something showy and not-too-expensive in a shop is their only conception of the ideal gift.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

By insisting on having your bottle pointing to the north when the cork is being drawn, and calling the waiter Max, you may induce an impression on your guests which hours of laboured boasting might be powerless to achieve. For this purpose, however, the guests must be chosen as carefully as the wine.