The ordinary chestnut can beget a sickly and reluctant laugh, but it takes a horse chestnut to fetch the gorgeous big horse-laugh.
The real yellow peril: Gold.
We all know about the habits of the ant, we know all about the habits of the bee, but we know nothing at all about the habits of the oyster. It seems almost certain that we have been choosing the wrong time for studying the oyster.
When your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do: throw it in the fire or take it to the watch-tinker. The former is the quickest.
If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.
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.
I can speak French but I cannot understand it.
If horses knew their strength we should not ride anymore.
One day man by the slow processes of evolution shall develop into something really fine and high – some billions of years hence, say.
The future interests me – I’m going to spend the rest of my life there.
There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.
Who are we to create a heaven and hell for ourselves, excluding animals and plants in the bargain, just because we have the power to rationalize?
There is more real pleasure to be gotten out of a malicious act, where your heart is in it, than out of thirty acts of a nobler sort.
Hotels are the only proper places for lecturers. When I am ill-natured I so enjoy the freedom of a hotel where I can ring up a domestic and give him a quarter and then break furniture over him.
The southerner talks music.
You can’t reason someone out of something that they weren’t reasoned into in the first place.
The truth hurts, but silence kills.
I told you this would happen. But, no, you had to go for the buffet, didn’t you?
Cats are the wildest of the tame and the tamest of the wild.
A Patriot is someone who stands for his country always, and for his government when it is deserved.