I’m merely running some errands. This is now off the record.
Can it be possible that the painters make John the Baptist a Spaniard in Madrid and an Irishman in Dublin?
We need not worry so much about what man descends from; it’s what he descends to that shames the human race.
I was warned to stop smoking, which I did, for two or three days, but it was too lonesome, and I have resumed – in a modified way – 4 smokes a day instead of 40. This will have a good effect. On the bank balance.
Wit and Humor – if any difference, it is in duration – lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage – the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.
There is nothing more awe-inspiring than a miracle except the credulity that can take it at par.
What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.
France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.
Duties are not performed for duty’s sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty – the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.
He was such a good man that people hated to see him coming.
I have criticized absent people so often, and then discovered, to my humiliation, that I was talking with their relatives, that I have grown superstitious about that sort of thing and dropped it.
There is nothing like instances to grow hair on a bald-headed argument.
The reason most people don’t go to church is because they’ve already been.
One compliment can keep me going for a whole month.
The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.
The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.
Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.
A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom when he can no longer be led by the nose.
I wrote ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Huck Finn’ for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.
The poetry is all in the anticipation, for there is none in reality.