Seasickness: at first you are so sick you are afraid you will die, and then you are so sick you are afraid you won't die.

We were surprised how closely the cuckoo imitated the clock-and yet, of course, it could never have heard a clock.

What's the use you learning to do right , when it's troublesome to do right and it ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?

My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy--a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us--which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.

I do not like an injurious lie, except when it injures somebody else.

In India, 'cold weather' is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.