I admire the serene assurance of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.
Whose property is my body? Probably mine. I so regard it. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the state die? Oh, no.
If you take epitaphs seriously, we ought to bury the living and resurrect the dead.
France has usually been governed by prostitutes.
I was born modest; not all over, but in spots.
Shut the door, not that it lets in the cold, but that it lets out the coziness.
Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one.
For a male person bric-a-brac hunting is about as robust a business as making doll-clothes.
I am content to be a bric-a-bracker and a Ceramiker.
The very “marks” on the bottom of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into a gibbering ecstasy.
It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about. He attracted me by three things: his candid simplicity, his marvelous familiarity with ancient armor, and the restfulness of his company – for he did all the talking.
This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth.
In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.
Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures?
If you’ve got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!
In other localities certain places in the streams are much better than others, but at Niagara one place is just as good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere.
We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie; we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity.
An enemy can partly ruin a man, but it takes a good-natured injudicious friend to complete the thing and make it perfect.
The worst thing you can do to a man is to tell him he can have what he wants.
A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditchdigging. It is the insanest of all recreations. The inventor of it overlooked no detail that could furnish weariness, distress, harassment, and acute and long-sustained misery of mind and body.