When you want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, -- when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!

Jesus died to save men - a small thing for an immortal to do - and didn't save many, anyway. But if he had been damned for the race, that would have been act of a size proper to a god, and would have saved the whole race.

The highest pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor.

Life is but a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.

The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good. Only the mediocre is unendurable.

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.