So long as a man attends to his business the public does not count his drinks. When he fails they notice if he takes even a glass of root beer.

Not everything you hear about yourself can be considered good publicity. And if you have delicate sensibilities, the currycomb of public imagination frequently rubs your vanities the wrong way.

If you wish to collect complimentary material for a record of yourself, never appeal to your relations. They may be proud of you as an asset to the family name, but they have a gift for remembering your gawky period privately, the follies and faults you committed and have forgotten. You may have come up in the world with a laurel on your brow, but if you go back home forty years later wearing two laurels on your brow, and a noble expression, they will miss the point.

Mere words will not do. They must convey the color, charm, and pulse of life. They must have a private twinkle of wit in them that makes a good-natured noise like laughter through the keyhole of the reader's mind.

I believe if we can wait long enough that every honorable sorrow will become a kind of joy.

one trouble with all the churches is that they have too many incurable saints in them, men and women who pray too much and do too little, who cannot forget their own selfish salvation enough to look after other people's without feeling their own spiritual pulse all the time they are doing it. Of late I've sometimes suspected that it is nearly as debilitating to stay in the church all the time as it would be to stay in a hospital all the time.

It is easier to give all your goods to feed the poor, or not to have any goods - only your virtues, to boast of - than it is to judge the rich with charity.