Top 500 P. G. Wodehouse Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about in sea boots.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

102. “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

103. “I’m a bit short on brain myself; the old bean would appear to have been constructed more for ornament than for use, don’t you know; but give me five minutes to talk the thing over with Jeeves, and I’m game to advise any one about anything.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

104. “He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

105. “He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

106. “A roll and butter and a small coffee seemed the only things on the list that hadn’t been specially prepared by the nastier-minded members of the Borgia family for people they had a particular grudge against, so I chose them.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

107. “A lesser moustache, under the impact of that quick, agonised expulsion of breath, would have worked loose at the roots.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

108. “Well, there it is. That’s Jeeves. Where others merely smite the brow and clutch the hair, he acts. Napoleon was the same.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

109. “You’re one of those guys who can make a party just by leaving it. It’s a great gift.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

110. “What you want, my lad, and what you’re going to get are two very different things.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

111. “There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

112. “Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

113. “His spirit was willing, but his will was not spirited.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

114. “It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

115. “Say what you will, there is something fine about our old aristocracy. I’ll bet Trotsky couldn’t hit a moving secretary with an egg on a dark night.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

116. “I shuddered from stem to stern, as stout barks do when buffeted by the waves.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

117. “I love writing. I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

118. “Confidence, of course is an admirable asset to a golfer, but it should be an unspoken confidence. It is perilous to put it into speech. The gods of golf lie in wait to chasten the presumptious.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

119. “It was a fine cow, as cows go, but, like so many cows, it lacked sustained dramatic interest.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

120. “One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

121. “It’s one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor – and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that. ‘It’s no good trying to get Bertie to take the slightest interest’ is more or less the slogan, and I’m bound to say I’m all for it. A quiet life is what I like.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

122. “One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

123. “It isn’t often that Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

124. “Well, you know, there are limits to the sacred claims of friendship.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

125. “Providence looks after all the chumps of this world, and personally, I’m all for it.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

126. “The real objection to the great majority of cats is their insufferable air of superiority. Cats, as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by the fact that in Ancient Egypt they were worshipped as gods. This makes them too prone to set themselves up as critics and censors of the frail and erring human beings whose lot they share.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

127. “I can’t stand Paris. I hate the place. Full of people talking French.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

128. “You are falling into your old error, Jeeves, of thinking that Gussie is a parrot. Fight against this. I shall add the oz.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

129. “A girl who bonnets a policeman with an ashcan full of bottles is obviously good wife-and-mother timber.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

130. “However devoutly a girl may worship the man of her choice, there always comes a time when she feels an irresistible urge to haul off and let him have it in the neck.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

131. “What magic there is in a girl’s smile! It is the raisin which, dropped in the yeast of male complacency, induces fermentation.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

132. “It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

133. “Like one kissed by a goddess in a dream, he walked on air; and, while one is walking on air, it is easy to overlook the boulders in the path.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

134. “There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

135. “I am going to start at the bottom and work my way still further down.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

136. “Years before, when a boy, and romantic as most boys are, his lordship had sometimes regretted that the Emsworths, though an ancient clan, did not possess a Family Curse. How little he had suspected that he was shortly to become the father of it.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

137. “She seemed glad to see me. In fact, she actually said she was glad to see me – a statement no other aunt on the list would have committed herself to, the customary reaction of these near and dear ones to the spectacle of Bertram arriving for a visit being a sort of sick horror.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

138. “Trouble, after all, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

139. “I have no doubt that you could have flung bricks by the hour in England’s most densely populated districts without endangering the safety of a single girl capable of becoming Mrs. Augustus Fink-Nottle without an anaesthetic.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

140. “The exquisite code of politeness of the Woosters prevented me clipping her one on the ear-hole, but I would have given a shilling to be able to do it. There seemed to me something deliberately fat-headed in the way she persisted in missing the gist.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

141. “It was loud in spots and less loud in other spots, and it had that quality which I have noticed in all violin solos of seeming to last much longer than it actually did.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

142. “Aunt Agatha is my tough aunt, the one who eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices by the light of the full moon.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

143. “She looked like something that might have occured to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

144. “For the last day or so there had been a certain amount of coolness in the home over a pair of jazz spats which I had dug up while exploring in the Burlington Arcade.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

145. “Oh, I don’t know, you know, don’t you know?”

— P. G. Wodehouse

146. “He had the look of a frustrated tiger whose personal physician had recommended a strict vegetarian diet.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

147. “I have always had a suspicion that Aunt Dahlia, while invariably matey and bonhomous and seeming to take pleasure in my society, has a lower opinion of my intelligence than I quite like. Too often it is her practice to address me as ‘fathead’, and if I put forward any little thought or idea or fancy in her hearing it is apt to be greeted with the affectionate but jarring guffaw.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

148. “She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.”

— P. G. Wodehouse

149. “Have you ever seen a man, woman, or child who wasn’t eating an egg or just going to eat an egg or just coming away from eating an egg? I tell you, the good old egg is the foundation of daily life. Stop the first man you meet in the street and ask him which he’d sooner lose, his egg or his wife, and see what he says!”

— P. G. Wodehouse

150. “Why do you want a political career? Have you ever been in the House of Commons and taken a good look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot.”

— P. G. Wodehouse