Elsa Maxwell quotes

Nothing spoils a good party like a genius.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Party #Genius #Good Party

Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Laughter #Laughing #Firsts

I make enemies deliberately. They are the sauce piquante to my dish of life.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Enemy #Sauce #Dishes

Serve the dinner backward, do anything - but for goodness sake, do something weird.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Party #Food #Dinner

Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Fire #People #Church

The secret of my success is that no woman has ever been jealous of me.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Jealous #Secret

Seeing unhappiness in the marriage of friends, I was content to have chosen music and laughter as a substitute for a husband.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Marriage #Wedding #Laughter

Protocol may be defined as the code of etiquette which protects royalty from the competition of intellectual and social superiors.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Competition #Intellectual #May

[On Hollywood:] I had gone there expecting to see parties that reflected the stock-in-trade of the movies - glamour. Instead, I found the same attitude toward parties that European peasants had for baths. It was something to be done methodically every Saturday night ...
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Attitude #Party #Night

To get fifty people to a cocktail party in New York, you ask one hundred. In Hollywood, you invite twenty.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#New York #Party #People

Only those who have earned leisure know how to use it profitably.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Use #Leisure

Good manners - the longer I live the more convinced I am of it - are a priceless insurance against failure and loneliness. And anyone can have them.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Loneliness #Good Man #Priceless

Good manners spring from just one thing - kind impulses.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Spring #Good Man #Kind

People who have escaped from poverty are like old soldiers. In later years they recount the little, amusing incidents that happened infrequently, and conveniently forget the long, unrelieved stretches of misery and boredom.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Years #Long #People

The loudest psalm singer in the congregation always is a reformed sinner.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Singers #Psalms #Righteousness

the wealthy ... live in marble mausoleums surrounded by the suspicions and neuroses that have replaced the medieval moats which once isolated so-called aristocrats from reality.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Reality #Moats #Neurosis

don't try for wit. Settle for humor. You'll last longer.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Trying #Lasts #Settling

Keep your talent in the dark and you'll never be insulted.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Dark #Talent #Insulted

[On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Book #Museums #Trying

Fight fire with fire. If you must have bores, always put them together or at the same table ... bores have an effervescent chemical reaction on one another at a party. They invariably have a marvelous time trading banalities in the absence of competition. Clichés roll trippingly off the tongue like sparkling epigrams and trite observations acquire depth sinking into receptive minds.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Party #Fighting #Fire

Bores put you in a mental cemetery while you are still walking.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Cemetery #Bores #Stills

A bore is a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. Bores are always eager to be seen talking to you.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Talking #Giving #Vacuums

Giving parties is a trivial avocation, but it pays the dues for my union card in humanity.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Party #Giving #Humanity

Etiquette-a fancy word for simple kindness.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Kindness #Simple #Fancy

Down with boredom. It has to go.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Boredom

I don't hate anyone. I dislike. But my dislike is the equivalent of anyone else's hate.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Hate #Dislike

The cocktail party is easily the worst invention since castor oil
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Party #Oil #Cocktails

Cocktails are society's most enduring invention!
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Cocktails #Culinary #Invention

Anatomize the character of a successful hostess and the knife will lay bare the fact that she owes her position to one of three things: either she is liked, or she is feared, or she is important.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Character #Successful #Knives

Someone said that life is a party. You join in after it's started and leave before it's finished.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Party #Aging #Life Is

Most rich people are the poorest people I know.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#People #Rich #Rich People

Intolerance of mediocrity has been the main prop of my independence.
-- Elsa Maxwell

#Independence #Mediocrity #Intolerance