There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

The person who has no opinion will seldom be wrong.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

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.

It were not best that we should all think alike.

The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are 'no account,' go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them-if the people you go among suffer by the operation.

My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest.