Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do.

It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.

To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.

How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death; and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.