Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

Missionarying was a better thing in those days than it is in ours. All you had to do was to cure the head savage´s sick daughter by a miracle- a miracle like the miracle of Lourdes in our day, for instance- and immediately that head savage was your convert, and filled to the eyes with a new convert´s enthusiasm. You could sit down and make yourself easy now. He would take the ax and convert the rest of the nation himself.

Every inventor is a crackpot until his idea succeeds.

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

Learning softeneth the heart and breedeth gentleness and charity.

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

In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.