Saki

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never
happened.
– Saki

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.
– Saki

I hate posterity – it’s so fond of having the last word.
– Saki

It’s no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.
– Saki

You can’t expect a boy to be depraved until he has been to a good school.
– Saki

Never be a pioneer: it’s the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion.
– Saki

Scandal is merely the compassionate allowance which the gay make to the humdrum. Think
how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.
– Saki

He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
– Saki

Canada is all right really, though not for the whole weekend.
– Saki

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.
– Saki

A man must be a success by the time he’s thirty, or never. Answer: To have reached thirty is
to have failed in life.
– Saki

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 to the impending visitation, the
kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.
– Saki

I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never
try to talk English.
– Saki

I might have been a goldfish in a glass bowl for all the privacy I got.
– Saki

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.
– Saki

We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they
sometimes live apart.
– Saki

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went.
– Saki

Great Socialist statesmen aren’t made, they’re still-born.
– Saki

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.
– Saki

I believe I take precedence: you are merely the Club bore: I am the Club liar.
– Saki

There is a strong strain of madness in our family: if you haven’t noticed it yourself, all your
friends must have.
– Saki

Beauty is only sin deep.
– Saki

Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.
– Saki

I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
– Saki

All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren’t respectable live
beyond other people’s. A few gifted individuals manage to do both.
– Saki

Once a female, always a female. Nature is not always infallible but she always abides by her
mistakes.
– Saki

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.
– Saki

People yield more consideration to a mutilated mealtime than they ever would to a broken
heart.
– Saki