The Complete Short Stories

[...] be surrounded by Americans trying to talk French? No, thank you. I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.

[...] cats, [...] wonderful creatures which have assimilated themselves so marvellously with our civilization while retaining all their highly developed feral instincts.

[...] the Duchess declared I shouldn't write anything nasty in her book, and I said I shouldn't write anything in her nasty book, so there wasn't a very wide point of difference between us.

[...] the Mayor gave us a graphic account of a struggle he had with a wounded bear. I privately wished that the bears would win sometimes on these occasions; at least they wouldn't go vapouring about it afterwards.

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened. It's only the middle-aged who are really conscious of their limitations [...].

Life is full of disappointments, [...] and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions.

[...] if you want a lesson in elaborate artificiality, just watch the studied unconcern of a Persian cat entering a crowded salon, and then go and practise it for a fortnight.

The reason one's elders know so comparatively little is because they have to unlearn so much that they acquired by way of education before we were born.

[...] never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive, grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always truns out to be the King of Sweden.

[...] the art of life was the avoidance of the unattainable.

There ought [...] to be technical education classes on the science of present-giving. No one seems to have the faintest notion of what any one else wants, and the prevalent ideas on the subject are not creditable to a civilized community.