Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?

What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn't it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome forms?

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.

...Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God.'

I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.

I never write "metropolis" for seven cents when I can write "city" and get paid the same.

We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes