"The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example."
"I was born modest; not all over, but in spots."
"There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice."
"Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been."
"I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet."
"I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good."
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know."
"Prosperity is the best protector of principle."
"You can never find a Christian who has acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the everlasting and all-sufficient "people say." In all my seventy-two years and a half I have never come across such another ass as this human race is."
"Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition."
"The happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts and the happy delivery of it another."
"My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death."
"Cruelty Of all the creatures that were made, man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one--the solitary one--that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices--the most hateful. He is the only creature that has pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. Also--in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind."
"Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead."
"A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs."
"Their costumes, as to architecture, were the latest fashion intensified; they were rainbow-hued; they were hung with jewels--chiefly diamonds. It would have been plain to any eye that it had cost something to upholster these women."
"If you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool, they'll never find out."
"He had had much experience of physicians, and said "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 druther not."
"There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition. There are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it."
"To succeed in other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do."
"Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid."
"The government of my country snubs honest simplicity, but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two."
"To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing."
"The reason novelists nearly always fail in depicting women when they make them act, is that they let them do what they have observed some woman has done at some time or another. And that is where they make a mistake; for a woman will never do again what has been done before."
"Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."
"As to the Adjective: When in doubt, strike it out."
