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 s...
Familiarity breeds contempt and children.
A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken p...
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities Truth isn't.
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.
Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegeta...
Make money and the whole world will conspire to call you a gentleman.
Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man but it would deteriorate the cat.
New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.
There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked.
When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it...
What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.
I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and educatio...
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize compositi...
Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.
All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.