KATHARINE ELIZABETH FULLERTON GEROULD

There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.

Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and may not marry.

It is a poor cause which has to be lied for regularly.

Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.

The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.

No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.

Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.

The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.

Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.

All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.

One of the reasons, surely, why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them.

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist…. no one since Thomas Jefferson ... has really believed it.

… legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a reproach on them.

... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.

... if a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.

For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement.

No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.

The principle of fashion is . . . the principle of the kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin again.

On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.

The indiscreet questioner - and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man's duty either to the community or to any individual to answer - is a marauder, and there is every excuse for treating him as such.

Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin.

Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit.