The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.

Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian. ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception. ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility.