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.

I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct, nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.

The ancients stole all our ideas from us.

It's easy to endure adversity -- if it happens to someone else.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

No man that has ever lived has done a thing to please God--primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next.