We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

Man can seldom - very, very, seldom - fight a winning fight against his training; the odds are too heavy.

God puts something good and loveable in every man His hands create.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

In India, 'cold weather' is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.

If you want to change the future, you must change what you're doing in the present.

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.