"He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies. "
— P.G. Wodehouse

"You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Carry On, Jeeves)

"A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Summer Moonshine)

"Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Doctor Sally)

"The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun. "
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good."
— P.G. Wodehouse

""No novelists any good except me. Sovietski -- yah! Nastikoff -- bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.""
— P.G. Wodehouse

"It was my Uncle George who discovered alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought."
— P.G. Wodehouse

""Suddenly there was a sound like G.K. Chesterton falling on a tin roof.""
— P.G. Wodehouse

"The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin. "
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
— Oscar Wilde

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
— Oscar Wilde

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
— Oscar Wilde

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it."
— Oscar Wilde

"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

"I can resist anything, except temptation."
— Oscar Wilde

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."
— Oscar Wilde

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."
— Oscar Wilde

"Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do."
— Oscar Wilde

"Youth is wasted on the young."
— Oscar Wilde

"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)"
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windemere's Fan)

"Work is the curse of the drinking classes."
— Oscar Wilde

"This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go."
— Oscar Wilde

"Life is too short to learn German"
— Oscar Wilde

"Just going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it."
— G.K. Chesterton

"If there were no God, there would be no atheists."
— G.K. Chesterton

"...it (feminism) is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable."
— G.K. Chesterton (Heretics: The Annotated)

"It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything."
— G.K. Chesterton

"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions."
— G.K. Chesterton

"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
— G.K. Chesterton (The Wisdom of Father Brown)

"To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can imagine how this can exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive."
— G.K. Chesterton

"He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--"
— G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday)

"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."
— G.K. Chesterton

"I entertain a private suspicion that physical sports were much more really effective and beneficent when they were not taken quite so seriously. One of the first essentials of sport being healthy is that it should be delightful; it is rapidly becoming a false religion with austerities and prostrations."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream."
— Malcolm Muggeridge

"If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner."
— Malcolm Muggeridge

"Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message."
— Malcolm Muggeridge

"I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me.
But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind."
— Stephen Fry

"After about 20 years of marriage, I think I'm finally starting to scratch the surface of what women want. And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate."
— Mel Gibson