Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brains. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat. Perhaps a couple of whales would be enough.
One of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.
To be great, truly great, you have to be the kind of person who makes the others around you great.
I have always been rather better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved.
Life is short, break the rules.
There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.
A journalist is a reporter out of a job.
Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.
The ancients stole all our ideas from us.
Why should anybody want to save the human race, or damn it either? Does God want its society? Does Satan?
No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done.
Everybody’s private motto: It’s better to be popular than right.
There is no urge so great as for one man to edit another man’s work.
How far we travel in life matters far less than those we meet along the way.
Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues.
It was a place of sin, loose women, whiskey and gambling. It was no place for a good Presbyterian, and I did not long remain one.
The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad – but whiskey!
By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.
The old Irish when immersing a babe at baptism left out the right arm so that it would remain pagan for good fighting.
Wine is a clog to the pen, not an inspiration.