We called him Barney for short. We couldn’t use his real name, there wasn’t time.
If it would not look too much like showing off, I would tell the reader where New Zealand is.
It’s so damned humiliating.
It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it.
Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.
Christianity will doubtless still survive in the earth ten centuries hence- stuffed and in a museum.
Preachers are always pleasant company when they are off duty.
The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession-and take the credit of the correction.
These are the true and only God, mighty and supreme.
America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.
I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.
Troubles are only mental; it is the mind that manufactures them, and the mind can gorge them, banish them, abolish them.
There are no accidents, all things have a deep and calculated purpose; sometimes the methods employed by Providence seem strange and incongruous, but we have only to be patient and wait for the result: then we recognize that no others would have answered the purpose, and we are rebuked and humbled.
No public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.
Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made him with an appetite for sand.
I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with the blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.
The calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for.
A man who carries a cat by the tail is getting experience that will always be helpful. He isn’t likely to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn’t likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!
I have been cautioned to talk but be careful not to say anything. I do not consider this a difficult task.
All scenery in California requires distance to give it its highest charm.