A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment.
Heroine: girl who is perfectly charming to live with, in a book.
There are women who have an indefinable charm in their faces which makes them beautiful to their intimates, but a cold stranger who tried to reason the matter out and find this beauty would fail.
A healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any occupation.
Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded.
A group of men in evening clothes looks like a flock of crows, and is just about as inspiring.
We must put up with clothes as they are they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us to advertise what we wear them to conceal.
Do not offer a compliment and ask a favor at the same time. A compliment that is charged for is not valuable.
If there is one thing that will make a man peculiarly and insufferable self-conceited, it is to have his stomach behave itself, the first day at sea, when nearly all his comrades are seasick.
All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth – including America, of course – consist of pilferings from other people’s wash. No tribe, howsoever insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty occupies a foot of land that was not stolen.
It is my custom to keep on talking until I get the audience cowed.
Only when a republic’s life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is wrong. There is no other time.
I never did a thing in all my life, virtuous or otherwise that I didn’t repent of within twenty-four hours.
Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness – and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty.
It is easier to manufacture seven facts out of whole cloth than one emotion.
History teaches us that whenever a weak and ignorant people possess a thing which a strong and enlightened people want, it must be yielded up peaceably.
No one has ever seen a Republican mass meeting that was devoid of the perception of the ludicrous.
The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend is immortal.
Eternal rest sounds comforting in the pulpit; well, you try it once, and see how heavy time will hang on your hands.
And so I am become a knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows.