Nero Wolfe Quotes

“We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.”
― Rex Stout, The Rubber Band

“I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.”
― Rex Stout, Might as Well Be Dead

“Chili is one of the great peasant foods. It is one of the few contributions America has made to world cuisine. Eaten with corn bread, sweet onion, sour cream, it contains all five of the elements deemed essential by the sages of the Orient: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, and bitter.”
― Rex Stout

“To assert dignity is to lose it.”
― Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men

“Mrs. Rachel Bruner: [trying to goad Wolfe] I thought you were afraid of nobody and nothing.

Nero Wolfe: [unruffled] I can dodge folly without backing into fear.”
― Rex Stout

“To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.”
― Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance

“The avoidance of idiocy should be the primary and constant concern of every intelligent person," - Nero Wolfe”
― Rex Stout

“Courtesy is one's own affair, but decency is a debt to life”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef's ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish.”
― Rex Stout

“... nature has arranged that when you overcome a given inertia the resulting momentum is proportionate. If I were to begin borrowing money I would end by devising means of persuading the Secretary of the Treasury to lend me the gold reserve.”
― Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance

“When I told [Lily Rowan] I wouldn't be able to make it to the Polo Grounds tomorrow, she began to call Wolfe names, and thought of several new ones that showed her wide experience and fine feeling for words.”
― Rex Stout, Before Midnight