The ordinary chestnut can beget a sickly and reluctant laugh, but it takes a horse chestnut to fetch the gorgeous big horse-laugh.

If we were meant to talk more than listen, we would have two mouths and one ear.

He had an uncommon fondness for cats. As an old man summering in New Hampshire, Twain even rented kittens from a nearby farm to keep him company until he returned home. "If man could be crossed with the cat," said Twain, "it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat." There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.

The most permanent lessons in morals are those which come, not of book teaching, but of experience.

There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.

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

France has usually been governed by prostitutes