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The only reason why King Henry of England, whose son sank with the White Ship, never smiled again, was because Lieutenant Larsen had not then invented his admirable Exercises.
Science, with a thousand triumphs to her credit, has not yet succeeded in discovering the correct reply for a young man to make who finds himself in the appalling position of being apologized to by a pretty girl.
He had very little mind, but what he had was suffering.
It is useless to try to gloss over the fact, the Younger Son is not required.
It was amazing what a difference it made to a man’s comfort, this fair prospect of getting his younger son off his hands.
He was as completely happy as only a fluffy-minded old man with excellent health and a large income can be. Other people worried about all sorts of things – strikes, wars, suffragettes, diminishing birth-rates, the growing materialism of the age, and a score of similar subjects. Worrying, indeed, seemed to be the twentieth century’s specialty.
He never experienced the thrill of ambition fulfilled, but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of ambition frustrated.
Collecting, as Mr Peters did it, resembles the drink habit. It begins as an amusement, and ends as an obsession.
There is every kind of restaurant in London, from the restaurant which makes you fancy you are in Paris to the restaurant which makes you wish you
If girls realized their responsibilities, they would be so careful when they smiled that they would probably abandon the practice altogether. There are moments in a man’s life when a girl’s smile can have as important results as an explosion of dynamite.
In every man’s life there is generally one moment to which in later years he can look back and say, ‘In this moment I fell in love.’
Cold is the ogre which drives all beautiful things into hiding. Below the surface of a frost-bound garden there lurk hidden bulbs which are only biding their time to burst forth in a riot of laughing colour (unless the gardener has planted them upside down), but shivering Nature dare not put forth her flowers till the ogre has gone.
‘If I could have accepted the mouse from any one, I would certainly have accepted it from you.’
One of the Georges – I forget which – once said that a certain number of hours’ sleep each night – I cannot recall at the moment how many – made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory.
Coming down to first causes, the only reason why collisions of any kind occur is because two bodies defy Nature’s law that a given spot on a given plane shall at a given moment of time be occupied by only one body.
The Earl of Emsworth was one of the world’s leading potterers, and Sunday morning was his favourite time for pottering. Since breakfast he had pottered about the garden, pottered round the stables, and pottered about the library. He now pottered into the museum.
A drawback to success in life is that failure, when it does come, acquires an exaggerated importance.
