I make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more.

How sick one gets of being "good," how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.

It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!

Destitution and excessive luxury develop apparently the same ideals, the same marauding attitude towards mankind, the intensity of struggle for material goods, -- surely showing how perfect is the meeting of extremes.

Though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.