Quotes

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have someone to divide it with.

Put all your eggs in one basket -- and watch that basket!

The holy passion of friendship is so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring in nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear -- not absence of fear.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought — a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Labor in loneliness is irksome.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

Government is merely a servant – merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles — by the ears, by the heels, or any other way, so you manage it.

The elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.

In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.

H'aint we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?

All kings is mostly rapscallions.

What's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?

There are those who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life—life's "experiences"—are in some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never know one of them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side.