Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man s, I mean.
I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.
Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.
The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.
When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.
A man cannot be made comfortable without his own approval.
Sometimes too much drink is barely enough.
Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.
Keep away from small people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?
It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.
There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.
Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.
It is nobler to be good, and it is nobler to teach others to be good -- and less trouble!
That's what an army is -- a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.
The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.
A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.
We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.
A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential -- there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.
Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.
My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.
The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.
A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.
There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.
Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.
Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.
The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell -- you see, I have friends in both places.
If to be interesting is to be uncommonplace, it is becoming a question, with me, if there are any commonplace people.
I think a compliment ought to always precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.
Noise proves nothing, Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.
There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me --I always feel that they have not said enough.
If you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one.
I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.
I can live for two months on a good compliment.
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world -- and never will.
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.
A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear -- not absence of fear.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.
The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession, but carrying a banner.
There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.
Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly -- a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.
Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: -- I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.
A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.
The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.
Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again -- and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law.
On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there's any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.
Why is it that we rejoice at birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race: he brought death into the world.
We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
All say, How hard it is that we have to die -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct -- nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.
It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.
What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought -- an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first -- that is the idea.
The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think -- yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.
Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty --the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.
Do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?
The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.
We are all alike, on the inside.
Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.
I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.
There is nothing so annoying as a good example!!
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
Faith is believing what you know ain't so.
It was the schoolboy who said, Faith is believing what you know ain't so.
Familiarity breeds contempt; and children.
We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.
Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.
When one has tasted it [Watermelon] he knows what the angels eat.
I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy.
Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.
Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.
I did not attend his funeral; but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it. [About a politician who had recently died]
He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.
Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered -- either by themselves or by others.
Golf is a good walk spoiled.
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
We have the best government that money can buy.
Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows -- it must grow; nothing can prevent it.
A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.
Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
To stop smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know; I've done it a thousand times.
Happiness ain't a thing in itself --it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant. And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain't happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh.
There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one: keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
The way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.
Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
The trouble with you Chicago people is that you think you are the best people down here, whereas you are merely the most numerous.
History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal.
One may make their house a palace of sham, or they can make it a home, a refuge.
Honesty is the best policy -- when there is money in it.
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
There is a great deal of human nature in people.
If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.
There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.
The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.
Man is a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.
A crank is someone with a new idea -- until it catches on.
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.
I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it.
When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have him around. When I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.
You cannot depend on your judgments when your imagination is out of focus.
Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up.
Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.
When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.
As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!
Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race -- the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.
Accident is the name of the greatest of all inventors.
True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.
In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.
You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.
All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they're a mighty ornery lot. It's the way they're raised.
We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain't so.
Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest.
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
There is no such thing as the Queen's English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!
The human race has but one really affective weapon, and that is laughter.
Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.
Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.
We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.
Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.
Never learn to do anything. If you don't learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you.
A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.
A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants.
I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won t.
One of the striking differences between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives.
Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought --a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
Be good and you will be lonely.
Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.
Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: The one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.
Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.
The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only -- not from its privileged classes.
Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.
There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe... the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.
When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.
If you are speaking the truth you don't have to remember anything.
Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.
The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.
The lack of money is the root of all evils.
I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
His money is twice tainted: taint yours and taint mine.
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any FIRST AND FOREMOST object but one -- to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for HIMSELF.
There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.
Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought -- by force of circumstances, not argument -- to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them.
France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.
Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.
Warm summer sun, shine kindly here. Warm southern wind, blow softly here. Green sod above, lie light, lie light. Good night, dear Heart, Good night, good night.
Necessity is the mother of taking chances.
Obscurity and competence: That is the life that is worth living.
The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. [On Lohengrin]
Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self-Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.
It is difference of opinion that makes horse races.
It is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.
Public opinion is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.
There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.
The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.
My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest.
Stars are good too. I wish I could get some to put in my hair. But I suppose I never can. You would be surprised to find how far off they are, for they do not look it. When they first showed last night I tried to knock some down with a pole, but it didn't reach, which astonished me. Then I tried clods till I was all tired out, but I never got one. I did make some close shots, for I saw the black blot of the clod sail right into thee midst of the golden clusters forty or fifty times, just barely missing them, and if I could've held out a little longer, maybe I could've got one.
The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the prompting of a brave, determined spirit.
There is nothing sadder than a young pessimist.
Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.
If He Tom Sawyer had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
If they had not landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact.
Pity is for living, envy is for dead.
What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.
War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.
When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?
In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities.
Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.
He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.
You can't pray a lie.
Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else -- these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.
I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed.
Prosperity is the best protector of principle.
Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.
Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know.
There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is providence.
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.
It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.
In his private heart no man much respects himself.
When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.
No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.
It is a good idea to obey all the rules when you're young just so you'll have the strength to break them when you're old.
Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.
I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.
Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money of them.
Everyone is like a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one's self-approval.
The most difficult We do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.
The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman's construction, is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life. During twenty-three days in every month (in the absence of pregnancy) from the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle. Competent every day, competent every night. Also, she wants that candle -- yearns for it, longs for it, hankers after it, as commanded by the law of God in her heart.
The Pause; that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it.
It takes an enemy and a friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart. The one to slander you, and the other to get the news to you.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did, I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.
I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.
If you have nothing to say, say nothing.
There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.
There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can.
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then Success is sure.
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
We need not worry so much about what man descends from; it's what he descends to that shames the human race.
There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.
There it is: it doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on! somebody to hold in light esteem, somebody to be indifferent about.
Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.
I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.
I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.
To be good is noble, but to teach others how to be good is nobler and less trouble.
It is easier to stay out than get out.
There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.
Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.
We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks, if we agree with him.
A man can seldom -- very, very, seldom -- fight a winning fight against his training; the odds are too heavy.
Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing, but cabbage with a college education.
You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.
I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
A joke, even if it be a lame one, is nowhere so keenly relished or quickly applauded as in a murder trial.
Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.
Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time.
No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.
There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.
I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.
Be virtuous and you will be eccentric.
Virtue has never been as respectable as money.
There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.
The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.
O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief... for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be lead by the nose.
Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.
Wit and Humor -- if any difference, it is in duration -- lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage -- the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.
I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
I don't give a damn for man that can spell a word only one way.
An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half... I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop.... I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.
A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words... the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
Let us be grateful to Adam, our benefactor. He cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor.
Intellectual work is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.
Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.
I do not like work even when someone else does it.
Thunder is impressive, but it is lightning that does the work.
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.
Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.
As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.
Never do wrong when people are looking.
It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.