The thing for us to do is just to do our duty, and not worry about whether anybody sees us do it or not.

Independence-is loyalty to one's best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes.

Never learn to do anything: if you don't learn, you'll always find someone else to do it for you.

So you see, the quality of humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It's as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.

When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.

All kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.

Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.