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...

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over,...

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.

When they came it was as if the lord of the world had arrived, and had brought all the glories of its kingdoms along; and when they went they left a calm behind which was...

When majority is insane, sane must go to asylum.

I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any benefit when you are tired; I was always tired.

The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn’t it be?–it is the same the angels breathe.

It is noble to teach oneself, but still nobler to teach others–and less trouble.

April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

Yes – en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’ want no mo’.

Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

Two things which are the peculiar domain of the heart, not the mind—politics and religion. He doesn’t want to know the other side. He wants arguments and statistics for his own side, and nothing more.

Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.

A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made...

I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead.

The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done – these are traits of the human race at large.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions,...

It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.

Man is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight

I have had an aversion to good spelling for sixty years and more, merely for the reason that when I was a boy there was not a thing I could do creditably except spell according...

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity – another man’s, I mean.

It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more...

Like it! Yes—the way I’d like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough. No, Tom, I won’t be rich, and I won’t live in them cussed smothery houses. I like...

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter’s evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and...

There’s one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he’s crooked.

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered — either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor have risen into...

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.

There are two kinds of patriotism — monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government...

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.