Alas! those good old days are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his trouble to sleep simply by getting out his blocks and mortar and building an addition to a church.

Once I talked to the inmates of an insane asylum in Hartford. I have talked to idiots a thousand times, but only once to the insane.

Choosing not to read is like closing an open door to paradise

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

Well, no doubt it's a blessed thing to have an imagination that can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed.

The true and lasting genius of humour does not drag you thus to boxes labelled 'pathos,' 'humour,' and show you all the mechanism of the inimitable puppets that are going to perform. How I used to laugh at Simon Tapperwit, and the Wellers, and a host more! But I can't do it now somehow; and time, it seems to me, is the true test of humour. It must be antiseptic.

A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.