Honesty is often the best policy, but sometimes the appearance of it is worth six of it.

Adam did not want the apple for the apple's sake; he wanted it because it was forbidden.

A person who has a cat by the tail knows a whole lot more about cats than someone who has just read about them.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

Geniuses are people who dash off weird, wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, & then go & get booming drunk & sleep in the gutter. Genius elevates a man to ineffable speres [sic] far above the vulgar world, & fills his soul with a regal contempt for the gross & sordid things of earth. It is probably on account of this that people who have genius do not pay their board, as a general thing.

Be virtuous and you will be eccentric.