Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

Forgetting that several excuses are always less convincing than one.

The first questions to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievements, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.