There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
If you have to swallow a frog, don’t stare at it too long.
How empty is theory in the presence of fact!
Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.
When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart.
His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.
Conformity – the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.
But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
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 or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace.
When majority is insane, sane must go to asylum.
Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
Choosing not to read is like closing an open door to paradise.
When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.
I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die;.
She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination to deserve them or die.
Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene.
I was standing in our dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, ‘Susy was peacefully released today.’ It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement.
The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories – and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures.