A man speaks of what he knows, a woman of what pleases her: the one requires knowledge, the other taste.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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1. "All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
Alexander Woollcott
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
2. "It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
Oscar Wilde
3. "The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms - hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal."
James Thurber
Other categories: Various
4. "If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"
Abraham Lincoln
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
5. "Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place."
Billy Crystal
6. "Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."
Jane Austen, "Pride and Prejudice"
7. "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth."
Michael Kinsley
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
8. "Sex is like money; only too much is enough."
John Updike, "Couples"
Other categories: Richness and Money
9. "To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination."
George Jean Nathan
Other categories: Art and Culture
10. "Life is a long lesson in humility."
James M. Barrie
Other categories: Life and Death
11. "Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice."
Robin Morgan, "The Word of a Woman"
12. "Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal."
Lionel Trilling
Other categories: Art and Culture
13. "It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid."
George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman"
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
14. "Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet."
Lewis Mumford, "The Culture of Cities"
Other categories: Normality and Madness
15. "Sex is a conversation carried out by other means. If you get on well out of bed, half the problems of bed are solved."
Peter Ustinov
Other categories: Various
16. "Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation."
George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman"
Other categories: Authority, Government
17. "There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot."
George Bernard Shaw
Other categories: Sin and Conscience
18. "Everybody who does not live in a prostitute's bed and on a diet of cocaine snow is called an ascetic nowadays."
George Bernard Shaw
19. "The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation."
Angela Carter, "The Sadeian Woman"
20. "Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact."
Marlene Dietrich, "Marlene Dietrich's ABC"
Other categories: History and Nations
21. "I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together."
Charles Dickens
Other categories: History and Nations
22. "Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn."
George Bernard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah"
Other categories: Oration and Silence
23. "The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is."
George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman"
24. "Laughter is the closest distance between two people."
Victor Borge
Other categories: Various
25. "Englishwomen’s shoes look as if they had been made by someone who had often heard shoes described, but had never seen any."
Margaret Halsey, "With Malice Toward Some"
Other categories: Various
26. "The essential function of art is moral. [...] But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind."
David Herbert Lawrence
Other categories: Art and Culture
27. "Conscience is, in most men, an anticipation of the opinions of others."
Sir Henry Taylor, "The Statesman"
Other categories: Sin and Conscience
28. "Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions."
Martin Amis, "Novelists in Interview"
29. "Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!"
Aldous Huxley, "Aphorisms and Reflections"
Other categories: Education
30. "We must never confuse elegance with snobbery."
Yves Saint Laurent
Other categories: Various
31. "There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it."
Denis Diderot
32. "Common-sense appears to be only another name for the thoughtlessness of the unthinking. It is made of the prejudices of childhood, the idiosyncrasies of individual character and the opinion of the newspapers."
William Somerset Maugham, "A Writer?s Notebook"
Other categories: Intellect, Judgement
33. "There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say."
Cyril Connolly
Other categories: Bravery and Fear
34. "Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. "
Bertrand Russell
35. "There are people who laugh to show their fine teeth; and there are those who cry to show their good hearts."
Joseph Roux, "Meditations of a Parish Priest"
36. "Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit."
George Santayana, "The Life of Reason"
Other categories: Various
37. "Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty."
Aldous Huxley, "Do What You Will"
Other categories: Trust
38. "If Men and Women took their Pleasures as noisily as the Cats, what Londoner could ever hope to sleep of nights?"
Aldous Huxley, "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan"
Other categories: Nature and Animals
39. "A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion."
George Orwell, "Collected Essays"
Other categories: Wit and Humor
40. "Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people."
Alexander Theroux, "An Adultery"
41. "There is not so variable a thing in nature as a lady’s head-dress."
Joseph Addison
Other categories: Various
42. "Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation."
Honoré De Balzac
43. "Fashions fade, style is eternal."
Yves Saint Laurent
Other categories: Art and Culture
44. "No man can understand why a woman shouldn’t prefer a good reputation to a good time."
Helen Rowland, "Reflections of a Bachelor Girl"
Other categories: Woman and Man
45. "When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart."
Helen Rowland, "Reflections of a Bachelor Girl"
Other categories: Marriage
46. "The hardest task of a girl’s life, nowadays, is to prove to a man that his intentions are serious."
Helen Rowland, "A Guide to Men"
Other categories: Woman and Man
47. "Why does a man take it for granted that a girl who flirts with him wants him to kiss her — when, nine times out of ten, she only wants him to want to kiss her?"
Helen Rowland, "A Guide to Men"
Other categories: Woman and Man
48. "Every man wants a woman to appeal to his better side, his nobler instincts and his higher nature — and another woman to help him forget them."
Helen Rowland, "A Guide to Men"
Other categories: Woman and Man
49. "France may claim the happiest marriages in the world, but the happiest divorces in the world are "made in America.""
Helen Rowland, "A Guide to Men"
Other categories: History and Nations -:- Marriage
50. "The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor."
Zora Neale Hurston, "Their Eyes Were Watching God"
Other categories: Marriage
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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