Agnes Sligh Turnbull

Dogs’ lives are too short. Their only fault, really.

A country-bred man can always learn to get on with city people, but a town-bred fellah never gets the real hang of the country. You can put city polish on a man, but by golly, it seems you can’t ever rub it off him.

You must learn to drink the cup of life as it comes … without stirring it up from the bottom. That’s where the bitter dregs are!

[On religion:] Wasn’t it invented by man for a kind of solace? It’s as though he had said, ‘I’ll make me a nice comfortable garment to shut out the heat and the cold,’ and then it ends by becoming a strait-jacket.

Do you know that the tendrils of graft and corruption have become mighty interlacing roots so that even men who would like to be honest are tripped and trapped by them?

The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life’s sorrows.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

Men have become the tools of their trade.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Think with your whole body.

The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

I don’t let my mouth say nothin’ my head can’t stand.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.