Hector Hugh Munro quotes

Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#World

A beautifully constructed borshch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Conversation

There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Hatred #Humanity #Energy

There is no easy in the world neither hard everything is the same in a way.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#World #Way #Easy

In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Rooms #Cheese #Mice

Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Thinking #People #Blazing

He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Happiness #Unhappy #Instinct

On horseback he seemed to require as many hands as a Hindu god, at least four for clutching the reins, and two more for patting the horse soothingly on the neck.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Horse #Hands #Two

Monogamy is the Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Drinking #Wife #Mistress

I believe I once considerably scandalized her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Believe #Important #Soup

I always say beauty is only sin deep.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Sin

Children are given us to discourage our better emotions.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Children #Emotion #Given

The revenge of an elder sister may be long in coming, but, like a South-Eastern express, it arrives in its own good time.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Revenge #Long #May

There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Saint #Medieval #Disillusionment

It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Birth #Poet #Chiefs

I am not collecting copies of the cheaper editions of Omar Khayyám. I gave the last four that I received to the lift-boy, and I like to think of him reading them, with FitzGerald's notes, to his aged mother. Lift-boys always have aged mothers; shows such nice feeling on their part, I think.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Mother #Nice #Reading

A relative of mine ... spends his time producing improved breeds of sheep and pigs and chickens. So patronising and irritating to teh Almighty, I should think.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Thinking #Sheep #Pigs

Hating anything in the way of ill-natured gossip ourselves, we are always grateful to those who do it for us and do it well.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Hate #Grateful #Gossip

I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Sarcastic #Blessing #Trying

Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're still-born.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Communism #Born #Made

When people grow gradually rich their requirements and standard of living expand in proportion, while their present-giving instincts often remain in the undeveloped condition of their earlier days. Something showy and not-too-expensive in a shop is their only conception of the ideal gift.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#People #Giving #Charity

Life is full of its disappointments, and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Art #Disappointment #Life Is

The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Adversity #Cat #Men

He seems the incarnation of everything soft and silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let sleep.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Philosophy #Sleep #Cat

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Witty #Powerful #Humorous

Mother, may I go and maffick, Tear around and hinder traffic?
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Mother #Tears #May

I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Beautiful #Buddhism #Thinking

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Age #Youth #Young

He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Sarcastic #Witty #Powerful

I hate posterity - it's so fond of having the last word.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Hate #Lasts #Last Words

The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#People

Every reformation must have its victims. You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Angel #Enthusiasm #Return

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Cooking #Culinary #Cooks

Romance at short notice was her speciality.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Romance

And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Taken #Alarms #Vagueness

The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Hammocks #Stories #Yeats

No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Christian #Atheist

Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Home #Together #Poverty

I hate babies. They're so human.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Baby #Hate #Kids

Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Funny #Children #Cat

It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Optimism #Pessimism #Middle

Women and elephants never forget an injury.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Women #Elephants #Never Forget

To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Clever #Dining #Afternoon

Find yourself a cup of tea, the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Healing #Tea #Finding Yourself

The cat is domestic only as far as suits its own ends...
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Cat #Suits #Ends

But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Education #School #Boys

You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Soul #Widowhood #Brevity

Whenever a massacre of Armenians is reported from Asia Minor, every one assumes that it has been carried out "under orders" from somewhere or another; no one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbours now and then.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Thinking #Order #People

To be among people who are smothered in furs when one hasn't any oneself makes one want to break most of the Commandments.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#People #Want #Fur

Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Book #Sophie #Conviction

Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Fashion #Strong #Paris

His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Fashion #Attention #Losing

By insisting on having your bottle pointing to the north when the cork is being drawn, and calling the waiter Max, you may induce an impression on your guests which hours of laboured boasting might be powerless to achieve. For this purpose, however, the guests must be chosen as carefully as the wine.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Wine #Guests #May

I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Thinking #Moral #Manners

If he had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game. I never know what the big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the destructive energies of some of our social misfits.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Animal #Games #Energy

Oysters are more beautiful than any religion....Theres nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Beautiful #Buddhism #Oysters

You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Food #Wine #Men

The man is a common murderer. A common murderer, possible, but a very uncommon cook.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Men #Cooking #Common

Children with Hyacinth's temperament don't know better as they grow older; they merely know more.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Children #Hyacinths #Grows

The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience; you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Fashion #Catholic #Mind

Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Childhood #Wish #Next

We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Couple #Sometimes #Prime

People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Children #Sight #People

All decent people live beyond their incomes; those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's; a few gifted individuals manage to do both.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Life #People #Income

He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary to invent it.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Christian #Facts #Glory

It's no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Use #Growing #Way

Addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Addresses #Given

Never be a pioneer. It's the early Christian that gets the fattest lion.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Christian #Pioneers #Lions

People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Religious #People #Decay

It is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Country #Average #Ordinary

There are certain fixed rules that one observes for one's own comfort. For instance, never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Kings #Smoking #Rude