We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them...

The mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.

To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.

As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we had recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber.

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.

The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.