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.

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

Like fingerprints, all marriages are different.

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

In the arts of life main invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. ... There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.