The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?

I [Death] was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.

No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.

We find things beautiful because we recognize them and contrariwise we find things beautiful because their novelty surprises us.

A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.