The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

God is on the side of the big battalions.

For liver the only place is Vichy, where you drink the water straight out of the ground in yellow glasses before it has time to lose its radioactivity or whatever else its secret may be. The bottled water is quite useless.

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

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.

A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself.

When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.

No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Man can climb to the highest summits; but he cannot dwell there long.

Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try another experiment.

The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.

Revolutionary movements attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.

I began as a passion and have ended as a habit, like all husbands.

What is life but a series of inspired follies?

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.

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

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

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

Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

Scratch an Englishman and find a Protestant.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

The roulette table pays nobody except him who keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.

The customs of your tribe are not laws of nature.

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