The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.

What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings. I am no longer of ye-what ye say of me is now of no consequence.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

You must not pay a person a compliment, and then straightway follow it with a criticism.