When you got to the table you couldn't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn't really anything the matter with them. That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.

It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips.

The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all.

The old Irish when immersing a babe at baptism left out the right arm so that it would remain pagan for good fighting

The vast majority of the race whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind at heart and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.

A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.

It is the will of God that we must have critics and missionaries and congressmen and humorists, and we must bear the burden