It liberates the vandal to travel-you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction.
I have not professionally dealt in truth. Many when they come to die have spent all the truth that was in them, and enter the next world as paupers. I have saved up enough to make an astonishment there.
Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.
I don’t mind what the opposition say of me so long as they don’t tell the truth about me. But when they descend to telling the truth about me I consider that this is taking an unfair advantage.
Truth is stranger than fiction-to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.
When in doubt, tell the truth. That maxim I did invent, but never expected it to be applied to me. I did say, “When you are in doubt,” but when I am in doubt myself I use more sagacity.
My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
It is not worth while to strain one’s self to tell the truth to people who habitually discount everything you tell them, whether it is true or isn’t.
Tell the truth or trump-but get the trick.
But it was ever thus, all through my life: whenever I have diverged from custom and principle and uttered a truth, the rule has been that the hearer hadn’t strength of mind enough to believe it.
I like the truth sometimes, but I don’t care enough for it to hanker after it.
Never learn to do anything: if you don’t learn, you’ll always find someone else to do it for you.
Let us be grateful to Adam: he cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor.
The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy with the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkaed and schoisched with a step peculiar to myself – and the kangaroo.
On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.
Eight grown Americans out of ten dread the coming of the Fourth, with its pandemonium and its perils, and they rejoice when it is gone-if still alive.
Prediction is difficult- particularly when it involves the future.
I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he says – “Yes; the little ones does”.
It was on the 10th day of May – 1884 – that I confessed to age by mounting spectacles for the first time, and in the same hour I renewed my youth, to outward appearance, by mounting a bicycle for the first time. The spectacles stayed on.