It is well we cannot see into the future. There are few boys of fourteen who would not feel ashamed of themselves at forty.

I could not conjure up one melancholy fancy upon a mutton chop and a glass of champagne.

If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.

I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.

If a man stopped me in the street and demanded of me my watch, I should refuse to give it to him. If he threatened to take it by force, I feel I should, though not a fighting man, do my best to protect it. If, on the other hand, he should assert his intention of trying to obtain it by means of an action in any court of law, I should take it out of my pocket and hand it to him, and think I had got off cheaply.

Give an average baby a fair chance, and if it doesn't do something it oughtn't to a doctor should be called in at once.

So, eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself, which he has religiously held to ever since, and that was to count each fish that he caught as ten, and to assume ten to begin with. For example, if he did not catch any fish at all, then he said he had caught ten fish - you could never catch less than ten fish by his system; that was the foundation of it. Then, if by any chance he really did catch one fish, he called it twenty, while two fish would count thirty, three forty, and so on.