Hector Hugh Munro Quotes
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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.
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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.
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It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practiced it in a tent.
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He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary to invent it.
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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.
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It is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country.
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I am not collecting copies of the cheaper editions of Omar Khayyám. I gave the last four that I received to the lift-boy, and I like to think of him reading them, with FitzGerald's notes, to his aged mother. Lift-boys always have aged mothers; shows such nice feeling on their part, I think.
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Women and elephants never forget an injury.
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If he had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game. I never know what the big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the destructive energies of some of our social misfits.
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Never be a pioneer. It's the early Christian that gets the fattest lion.
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Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.
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Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.
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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.
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Children with Hyacinth's temperament don't know better as they grow older; they merely know more.
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Romance at short notice was her speciality.
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Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world.
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Find yourself a cup; the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things.
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Life is full of its disappointments, and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions.
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We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart.
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The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.
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The man is a common murderer. A common murderer, possible, but a very uncommon cook.
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I hate posterity - it's so fond of having the last word.
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The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.
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I hate babies. They're so human.