The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.
If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value.
It is not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that make horseraces.
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.
Adam was but human-this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else – these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
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.
The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.
Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.
Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.
Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.
All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.
It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.
It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.
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.
He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.
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