Hector Hugh Munro

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

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

“Scandal is merely the compassionate allowance which the gay make to the humdrum.”

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

“In baiting a mouse trap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.”

“To have reached thirty is to have failed in life.”

“Boring is merely a labeled failure of the imagination.”

“A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.”

“I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.”

“A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere is like a cat that goes fishing with its master's pet goldfish.”

“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.”

“I hate babies. They're so human.”

“She was a woman of commanding presence and arbitrary disposition, and had the fullest confidence in her own bad judgment.”

“People talk of the pathos of the dumb animal, but the pathos of the dumb human is a good deal more poignant.”

“Children are given us to discourage our better emotions.”

“When you are young you want to be a Galahad, a Crusader. It is later on that you find it is more convenient to be a temporizing Pontius Pilate.”

“No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.”

“The trouble is that people are self-centered, and the supreme proof of it is that they expect others to be interested in them.”