Always obey your parents. When they are present. This is the best policy in the long run. Because if you don't, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.

The darling mispronunciations of childhood! - dear me, there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again.

It has taken a weary long time to persuade American Presbyterians to give up infant damnation and try to bear it the best they can.

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.

The first time a student realizes that a little learning is a dangerous thing is when he brings home a poor report card.