33 Quotes by Edward Verrall Lucas

To-day well, my Utopia, if ever I framed one, would be a land where the laws demanded that people should be vicious. Then one would be able to count at any rate on a little virtue. If no man might live with a woman in any but an irregular union, there would be at once quite a run on honest matrimony and the Law Courts would be full of desperately wicked monogamists; while if every one was expected to steal and swindle, there would soon be an extensive criminal class who respected property.

I walked back by way of the sea-lions' enclosure to refresh my eyes with the King Penguin's perfect ecclesiastical tailoring. He was pacing moodily about as usual, in what one felt to be the interval between a marriage ceremony and a funeral service. Much better, I thought, to have left the 2000 a year to him. No harm would then be done, and what perfect episcopal garden-parties he could give with it!

Into golf I cannot follow him; partly because I have never played, and partly because I like socialism in games, and the idea of employing a caddie will always be unpleasant to me.

I have come to the conclusion that the golfing temperament is essentially aristocratic— a feudal inheritance — the property exclusively of those who can see nothing absurd or even degrading in the spectacle of powerful frivolous men being followed by boys of burden.

There is no diplomacy like candor.

I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.

The noise from good toast should reverberate in the head like the thunder of July.

The art of life is to show your hand.

Every saint has a bee in his halo.