The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.

My mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart-a heart so large that everybody's joys found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation.

It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.

If you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool, they'll never find out.

I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.

A marriage...makes of two fractional lives a whole; it gives to two purposeless lives a work, and doubles the strength of each to perform it; it gives to two questioning natures a reason for living, and something to live for; it will give a new gladness to the sunshine, a new fragrance to the flowers, a new beauty to the earth, and a new mystery to life.

Geniuses are people who dash off weird, wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, & then go & get booming drunk & sleep in the gutter. Genius elevates a man to ineffable speres [sic] far above the vulgar world, & fills his soul with a regal contempt for the gross & sordid things of earth. It is probably on account of this that people who have genius do not pay their board, as a general thing.