“All say, How hard it is that we have to die -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.”
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”
“There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.”
“I did not attend his funeral; but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it. [About a politician who had recently died]”
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
“He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think -- yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.”
“He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.”
“Let us be grateful to Adam, our benefactor. He cut us out of the ''blessing'' of idleness and won for us the ''curse'' of labor.”
“Do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.”
“The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either.”
“The trouble with you Chicago people is that you think you are the best people down here, whereas you are merely the most numerous.”
“There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.”
“I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.”
“Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.”
“In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.”
“Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.”
“The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.”
“The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.”
“It takes an enemy and a friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart. The one to slander you, and the other to get the news to you.”
“Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.”
“There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe... the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.”
“War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.”
“All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they're a mighty ornery lot. It's the way they're raised.”
“She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.”
“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.”
“Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.”
“The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.”
“There is no such thing as ''the Queen's English.'' The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!”
“There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.”
“I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct -- nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.”