It Is Not Permissible To Lie Merely

... If A Person Is To Be Unconventional, He Must Be Amusing Or He Is Intolerable: For, In The Nature Of The Case, He Guarantees You Nothing But Amusement. He Does Not Guarantee You Any Of The Little Amenities By Which Society Has Assured Itself That, If It Must Go To Sleep, It Will At Least Sleep In A Comfortable Chair.

We Put [young Children] Into Kindergarten Where Their Reasoning Powers Are Ruined; Or, If We Can Afford It, We Buy Montessori Outfits That Were Invented For Semi-imbeciles In Italian Slums; Or We Send Them To Outdoor Schools And Give Them Prizes For Sleeping.

It Is Not Strange That Some Of Our Revoltes Preach Trial Marriage: For The Only Safe Way To Marry Them At All Would Be On Trial. Until You Had Definitely Experienced All The Human Situations With Them, You Would Have No Means Of Knowing How, In Any Given Situation, They Would Behave. They Might Conform About Evening-dress, And Throw Plates Between Courses; They Might Be Charming To Your Friends, And Ask The Waiter To Sit Down And Finish Dinner With You. Or They Might In All Things, Little And Big, Be Irreproachable. The Point Is That You Would Never Know.

I Have Always, Privately And Humbly, Thought It A Pity That So Good A Word [as Culture] Should Go Out Of The Best Vocabularies; For When You Lose An Abstract Term, You Are Apt To Lose The Thing It Stands For.

The Principle Of Fashion Is . . . The Principle Of The Kaleidoscope. A New Year Can Only Bring Us A New Combination Of The Same Elements; And About Once In So Often We Go Back And Begin Again.