I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.
It usually takes me two or three days to prepare an impromptu speech.
Life itself is only a vision, a dream.Nothing exists; all is a dream. God–man–the world–the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars–a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space–and you!
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.
Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself.
There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous andshallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said ‘Faith is believing what youknow ain’t so’.
Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!
I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
There isn’t time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on ‘The Survival of the Fittest.’ These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.
Stay away from those people who try to disparage your ambitions. Small minds will always do that, but great minds will give you a feeling that you can become great too.
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
I never smoke to excess – that is, I smoke in moderation, only one cigar at a time.
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.
That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace.
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
Loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.
A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.
I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.
We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Nature has no originality–I mean, no large ability in the matter of inventing new things, new ideas, new stage effects. She has a superb and amazing and infinitely varied equipment of old ones, but she never adds to them. She repeats–repeats–repeats–repeats. Examine your memory and your experience; you will find it is true.