Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.

Familiarity breeds contempt and children.

If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won’t sit on a hot stove again. That cat won’t sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don’t like stoves.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

Do the thing you fear the most and the death of fear is certain.

Thou shalt not commit adultry is a command which makes no distinction between the following persons. They are all required to obey it: children at birth. Children in the cradle. School children. Youths and maidens....

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man...

Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered...

The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.

You know that kind of quiver that trembles around through you when you are seeing something so strange and enchanting and wonderful that it is just a fearful joy to be alive and look at...

But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.

Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater.

Who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it?

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Human nature is all alike.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for...

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is — in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree — it...

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that...

Stars and shadows ain’t good to see by.

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it, namely, that, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult...

Then the cow asked:”What is a mirror?””It is a hole in the wall,” said the cat. “You look in it, and there you see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal...

Wherefore, I beseech you let the dog and the onions and these people of the strange and godless names work out their several salvations from their piteous and wonderful difficulties without help of mine, for...

Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.

Profanazione del simbolo sacro.” Questo è quanto griderà la Cristianità. Sì, la Cristianità si agiterà. Può sentirmi accusato di mezzo milione di omicidi l’anno per vent’anni e mantenere la sua compostezza, ma profanare il Simbolo...

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man’s mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs...

Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

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...

Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.

Keep away from 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.

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

Satan must have been pretty simple, even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn’t have led Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship...

I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get...

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous andshallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said ‘Faith is believing what youknow ain’t so’.

This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth–ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it...

Write what you know.

There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one–on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many...

Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is...

Intellectual ‘work’ is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven...

We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can “show off” and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our...

A woman’s intuition is better than a man’s. Nobody knows anything, really, you know, and a woman can guess a good deal nearer than a man.