The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are 'no account,' go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them-if the people you go among suffer by the operation.

If to be interesting is to be uncommonplace, it is becoming a question, with me, if there are any commonplace people

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

I find no change of consequence in grown people, I do not miss the dead. It does not surprise me to hear that this friend or that friend died at such and such a time, because I fully expected that sort of news. But somehow I had made no calculation on the infants. It never occurred to me that infants grow up...These unexpected changes, from infancy to youth, and from youth to maturity, are by far the most startling things I meet with.

Except a person be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave.

You aim for the palace and get drowned in the sewer.

Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?