Hector Hugh Munro Quotes

No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.

We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart.

People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes.

The revenge of an elder sister may be long in coming, but, like a South-Eastern express, it arrives in its own good time.

You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.

The man is a common murderer. A common murderer, possible, but a very uncommon cook.

I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.

Children with Hyacinth's temperament don't know better as they grow older; they merely know more.

It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.

It is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country.

Once a female, always a female. Nature is not always infallible but she always abides by her mistakes.

Mother, may I go and maffick, Tear around and hinder traffic?

When people grow gradually rich their requirements and standard of living expand in proportion, while their present-giving instincts often remain in the undeveloped condition of their earlier days. Something showy and not-too-expensive in a shop is their only conception of the ideal gift.

The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside.

To be among people who are smothered in furs when one hasn't any oneself makes one want to break most of the Commandments.

On horseback he seemed to require as many hands as a Hindu god, at least four for clutching the reins, and two more for patting the horse soothingly on the neck.

Hating anything in the way of ill-natured gossip ourselves, we are always grateful to those who do it for us and do it well.

There are certain fixed rules that one observes for one's own comfort. For instance, 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 turns out to be the King of Sweden.

Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.

Monogamy is the Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.

The sacrifices of friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make them.

I always say beauty is only sin deep.

I hate babies. They're so human.

All decent people live beyond their incomes; those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's; a few gifted individuals manage to do both.

It's no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.

A relative of mine ... spends his time producing improved breeds of sheep and pigs and chickens. So patronising and irritating to teh Almighty, I should think.

He seems the incarnation of everything soft and silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let sleep.

Find yourself a cup of tea, the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things.

Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world.

His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect.

There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.

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

The cat is domestic only as far as suits its own ends ...

I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.