When everyone is looking for gold, it's a good time to be in the pick and shovel business.

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others-his last breath.

If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.

To be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount, that man isn't rich.

The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession-and take the credit of the correction.

The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples — that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.

Wherein lies a poet's claim to originality? That he invents his incidents? No. That he was present when his episodes had their birth? No. That he was first to repeat them? No. None of these things has any value. He confers on them their only originality that has any value, and that is his way of telling them.