Children have but little charity for one another's defects

But it was ever thus, all through my life: whenever I have diverged from custom and principle and uttered a truth, the rule has been that the hearer hadn't strength of mind enough to believe it.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Can it be possible that the painters make John the Baptist a Spaniard in Madrid and an Irishman in Dublin?

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his button-hole.

I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson's seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult. But I thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. It had only one fault - you could not hit anything with it.