“Good heavens! how marriage ruins a man! It's as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.”

“Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that?I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.”

“Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.”

“You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”

“The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.”

“Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden.""But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!""I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing.""That may be, but the muffins are the same!”

“It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”