Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.
There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.
The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.
Don’t wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.
There is no security in life, only opportunity.
Blasphemy? No, it is not blashphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if he is as little as that, He is beneath it.
The critic’s symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else’s dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.
All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.
History has tried hard to teach us that we can’t have good government under politicians. Now, to go and stick one at the very head of the government couldn’t be wise.
Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson.
Nothing helps scenery like bacon and eggs.
It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.
Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.
Don’t tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.
It is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn’t indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn’t detect.
An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.
In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race – never quite sane in the night.
To us, our house was not unsentient matter – it had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to see us with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction.