Imagination labors best in distant fields.

There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can.

For a male person bric-a-brac hunting is about as robust a business as making doll-clothes.

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

I will now claim - until dispossesed - that I was the first person in the world to apply the typewriter to literature. ... The early machine was full of caprices, full of defects- devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells. ... He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.

The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.

When a man arrives at great prosperity God did it: when he falls into disaster he did it himself.