Is the human race a joke? Was it devised and patched together in a dull time when there was nothing important to do?
I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, and how another man could be found to lust after it and buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented – which is another riddle which tires me.
Custom is, to think a handsome thing in private but tame it down in the utterance.
The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don’t tell you what to say.
Make your vocation your vacation. That is the secret to success.
By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again – and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s and each obeying its own law.
I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct, nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.
Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.
If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.
It isn’t safe to sit in judgment upon another person’s illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.
As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!
The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.
My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest.
More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.
To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else – these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.
Principles aren’t of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.
Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.
You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist’s custom.
Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.
I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.