Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
Every man is his own hell.
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
All government, of course, is against liberty.
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
