Best 70 quotes of Hector Hugh Munro on MyQuotes

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.

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.

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.

A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere is like a cat that goes on playing with a mouse long after she's killed it.

But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.

By insisting on having your bottle pointing to the north when the cork is being drawn, and calling the waiter Max, you may induce an impression on your guests which hours of laboured boasting might be powerless to achieve. For this purpose, however, the guests must be chosen as carefully as the wine.

Children are given us to discourage our better emotions.

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

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.

Every reformation must have its victims. You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return.

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

Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're still-born.

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.

He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.

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

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.

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.

He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

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

Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.

I always say beauty is only sin deep.

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.

I believe I once considerably scandalized her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience.

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.

I hate babies. They're so human.

I hate posterity - it's so fond of having the last word.

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

In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.

I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.

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

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

It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Oysters are more beautiful than any religion... There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.

People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.

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.

Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.

Romance at short notice was her speciality.

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

Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage.

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

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.