Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business streets [of New Orleans] to it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world.

In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.

The solution to our water problems is more rain.

Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vague curiosity about one of those.

A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab, and can't travel any way but sideways and backways.

Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity. That is where the true evil lies.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.