A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Mrs. Sarah Hill, bequeathed 1 pound annually, to be divided at Easter, between two boys and two girls who "have never been undutiful to their parents; who have never been known to swear or to tell untruths, to steal, or to break windows." Fancy giving up all that for five shillings a year! It is not worth it.
~ Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog)
"They have been noticing me," I thought to myself. "If anything, I have been a bit too good. A little less virtue and I might have lived longer..."
~ The Angel and the Author--and Others
It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find sympathy.
~ Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
Honesty is the most expensive luxury a man can indulge in.
~ The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
Her excessive goodness seems somehow to pall upon us. Our only consolation while watching her is that there are not many good women off the stage. Life is bad enough as it is; if there were many women in real life as good as the stage heroine, it would be unbearable.
~ Stage-Land
It is ever the good and amiable who suffer in this world.
~ Three Men on the Bummel
Have we not forgotten the meaning of the word "virtue"? Once it stood for the good that was in a man, irrespective of the evil that might lie there also, as tares among the wheat. We have abolished virtue, and for it substituted virtues. Not the hero--he was too full of faults--but the blameless valet; not the man who does any good, but the man who has not been found out in any evil, is our modern ideal.
~ The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow