M. E. W. Sherwood Quotes

It is better to pay court to a queen ... than to worship, as we too often do, some unworthy person whose wealth is his sole passport into society. I believe that a habit of respect is good for the human race.

Westminster Abbey is nature crystallized into a conventional form by man, with his sorrows, his joys, his failures, and his seeking for the Great Spirit. It is a frozen requiem, with a nation's prayer ever in dumb music ascending.

I think the Americans are the only people who have good beds. I consider the American bedroom unparalleled for freshness, comfort, and cleanliness. It is worth going all over Europe in order to come home to one's own bed.

Too many young painters of the day work for the crowd, and not for art. But, then, should not the painters of the day work for the education of the crowd?

Rome, like Washington, is small enough, quiet enough, for strong personal intimacies; Rome, like Washington, has its democratic court and its entourage of diplomatic circle; Rome, like Washington, gives you plenty of time and plenty of sunlight. In New York we have annihilated both.

To look at and properly appreciate the British Museum is the work of a lifetime.

This habit of free speaking at ladies' lunches has impaired society; it has doubtless led to many of the tragedies of divorce and marital unhappiness. Could society be deaf and dumb and Congress abolished for a season, what a happy and peaceful life one could lead!

English people ... are very kind, very friendly, interested in a general way, and consider us a great, wonderful, unknown sort of Australia, and that is all.

How often the Presidency has simply meant that a man shall be abused, distrusted, and worked to death while he is filling the great office, and that he should drop into unmerited oblivion when he has left the White House ...

Washington society has always demanded less and given more than any society in this country
demanded less of applause, deference,etiquette, and has accepted as current coin quick wit, appreciative tact, and a talent for talking.

War is a most uneconomical, foolish, poor arrangement, a bloody enrichment of that soil which bears the sweet flower of peace.

I should say tact was worth much more than wealth as a road to leadership ... I mean that subtle apprehension which teaches a person how to do and say the right thing at the right time. It coexists with very ordinary qualities, and yet many great geniuses are without it. Of all human qualities I consider it the most convenient
not always the highest; yet I would rather have it than many more shining qualities.

I did not find Liverpool ugly. Her stately public buildings, broad streets, public squares, and noble statues redeem her from the charge.

Holland is a land of intense paradox. It is quite impossible, but it is there.

The English are very fond of being entertained, and ... they regard the French and the American people as destined by Heaven to amuse them.

People who live in quiet, remote places are apt to give good dinners. They are the oft-recurring excitement of an otherwise unemotional, dull existence. They linger, each of these dinners, in our palimpsest memories, each recorded clearly, so that it does not blot out the others.

If you should put a knife into a French girl's learning it would explode and blow away like an omelette soufflee ...

In the early forties and fifties almost everybody "had about enough to live on," and young ladies dressed well on a hundred dollars a year. The daughters of the richest man in Boston were dressed with scrupulous plainness, and the wife and mother owned one brocade, which did service for several years. Display was considered vulgar. Now, alas! only Queen Victoria dares to go shabby.