Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

I don't know what to say about this book. The experience on which it is founded is so extraordinary, that an honest record of it should be preserved . . . But it would have driven me mad; and I am not sure that the author came out of it without a slight derangement.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.