Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time.

The choir always tittered and whispered all through the service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

To my mind that literature is best and most enduring which is characterized by a noble simplicity.

Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.

I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.