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

If you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one.

Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.

Temper is what gets most of us into trouble. Pride is what keeps us there.

There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.

whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Does the human being reason? No; he thinks, muses, reflects, but does not reason...that is, in the two things which are the peculiar domain of the heart, not the mind, politics and religion. He doesn't want to know the other side. He wants arguments and statistics for his own side, and nothing more.