One is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare

Sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn't roosting comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said, take a chicken when you get achance, because if you don't want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain't ever forgot. I never see papa when he didn't want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway.

To us, our house was not unsentient matter -- it had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to see us with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction.

It is not what a man knows, but what he thinks of in time.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.

I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good.