Quotes to inspire and reflect

Chopsticks are one of the reasons the Chinese never invented custard.

I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond.

A woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and champagne, the only true feminine and becoming viands.

Bread and butter, please. Cake is rarely seen at the best houses nowadays.

With an evening coat and a white tie…anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.

I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick. Not wounded. Dead.

I have always felt a gift diamond shines so much better than one you buy for yourself.

Is there anything worn under the kilt? No, it’s all in perfect working order.

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.

I would not be in some of your coats for twopence.

You can say what you like about long dresses, but they cover a multitude of shins.

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.

The only place men want depth in a woman is in her decolletage.

All Americans dress well—they get their clothes in Paris.

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

The greater part of every family is always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family, it is as much as can be expected.

I don’t have to look up my family tree, because I know that I’m the sap.

I’m very proud of my gold pocket watch. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch.

The Family! Home of all social evils, a charitable institution for indolent women, a prison workshop for the slaving breadwinner, and a hell for children.

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.

A family is a unit composed not only of children, but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.

I can’t help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

We are a nation of governesses.

They are like their own beer; froth on top, dregs at the bottom, the middle excellent.

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

I rode over the mountains to Huddersfield. A wilder people I never saw in England. The men, women, and children filled the streets as we rode along, and appeared just ready to devour us.

The English are not an inventive people; they don’t eat enough pie.

The English have a miraculous power to change wine into water.

If it is good to have one foot in England, it is still better, or at least as good, to have the other out of it.

For ‘tis a low, newspaper, humdrum, lawsuit Country…

The British have an umbilical cord which has never been cut and through which tea flows constantly. It is curious to watch them in times of sudden horror, tragedy, or disaster. The pulse stops apparently, and nothing can be done, and no move made, until “a nice cup of tea” is quickly made.

Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.

Silence can be defined as conversation with an Englishman.

[An Englishman] does everything on principle: He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles…

From every Englishman emanates a kind of gas, the deadly choke-lamp of boredom.

The most dangerous thing in the world is to make a friend of an Englishman, because he’ll come sleep in your closet rather than spend ten shillings on a hotel.

There’ll always be an England, even if it’s in Hollywood.

No Englishman is ever fairly beaten.

…the British public are really not equal to the mental strain of having more than one topic every three months.

All Englishmen talk as if they’ve got a bushel of plums stuck in their throats, and then, after swallowing them, get constipated from the pits.

England, the heart of a rabbit in the body of a lion.

…he is a typical Englishman, always dull and usually violent.

She has no bosom and no behind.

Academe, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n. A modern school where football is taught.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

I was thrown out of college for cheating on my metaphysics final….I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.