I felt it was my duty to praise all of God's works with fervent enthusiasm. At the same time I killed flies in my house in a spirit of hatred, exasperation and contempt. My praise to God for all his works was dishonest, the act of killing the fly was honest.

To be great, truly great, you have to be the kind of person who makes the others around you great.

A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.

Written things are not for speech; their form is literary; they are stiff, inflexible, and will not lend themselves to happy and effective delivery with the tongue-where their purpose is to merely entertain, not instruct; they have to be limbered up, broken up, colloquialized and turned into common forms of premeditated talk-otherwise they will bore the house and not entertain it.

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

There is nothing that saps one's confidence as the knowing how to do a thing

Never waste a lie; you never know when you may need it.