Society and the World

Although tact is a virtue, it is very closely allied to certain vices; the line between tact and hypocrisy is a very narrow one. I think the distinction comes in the motive.

Don’t flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Tact consists in knowing how far to go in going too far.

it is the universal or divine blood that flows through us all.

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.

We mount to heaven mostly on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes.

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

Every success is usually an admission ticket to a new set of decisions.

One day it happens. Success happens and it catches you by surprise. One day you are a signature, next day, you are an autograph.

Success is counted sweetest By those who ne’er succeed.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

Success took me to her bosom like a maternal boa constrictor.

Success is sweet, the sweeter if long delayed and attained through manifold struggles and defeats.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting.

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine which intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

There is no sin except stupidity.

We are not punished for our sins, but by them.

There’s only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best.

All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.

One leak will sink a ship: and one sin will destroy a sinner.

To sin by silence when we should protest, Makes cowards of men.