I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.

No man, deep down in the privacy of his heart, has any considerable respect for himself.

For instance, take this sample: he has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race - and of ours - sexual intercourse!It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have all longed-for things but one, and he should elect to leave out water!

The water is clearer than the air, and the air is the air that angels breathe.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life-hence it is a valuable possession to him.

Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else. This is not advice, it is merely custom.

Fleas can be taught nearly anything a congressman can.