If there is one thing that is really cheerful in the world, it is cheerfulness. I have noticed it often. And I have noticed that when a man is right down cheerful, he is seldom unhappy for the time being. Such is the nature of man.

The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.

Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees.

Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience.

Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existance.

The very "marks" on the bottom of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into a gibbering ecstasy.

A railroad is like a lie you have to keep building it to make it stand.