The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise...
No child should be permitted to grow up without exercise for imagination. It enriches life for him. It makes things wonderful and beautiful.
I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.
Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience.
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born – a hundred million years – and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.
Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.
The smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.
Congressman is the trivialist distinction for a full grown man.
The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn’t leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether-Well, you’d think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.
Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.
It is at our mother’s knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals.
The secret of making progress is to get started.
Life becomes fully understandable only the moment we realise that we are all mad.
I cherish the dreams of yesterday and dare not dwell on the err’s of my past whose fate has been long decided, and effect I can not change. For the dreams of yesterday are the challenges of today, and the hope for tomorrow.
Only he who has seen better days and lives to see better days again knows their full value.
Recipe for a long life: Only smoke while awake. Only run when being chased.
Yes, always avoid violence. In this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.
Some civilized women would lose half their charm without dress and some would lose all of it.
In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel.
Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down – he finds also that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefore he should write it down.