The average man is what his environment and his superstitions have made him; and their function is to make him an ass. He can't add up three or four new circumstances together and perceive what they mean; it is beyond him. He is not capable of observing for himself; he has to get everything at second-hand. If what are miscalled the lower animals were as silly as man is, they would all perish from the earth in a year.

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.

The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.

Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping. . . you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing; you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.

It has taken a weary long time to persuade American Presbyterians to give up infant damnation and try to bear it the best they can.

When a man's dog turns against hime, it is time for his wife to pack her trunk and go home to mamma.