We do not mind our not arriving anywhere nearly so much as our not having any company on the way..

Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?.

As crowds increase we build our forts of inattention, and the more we talk the easier it is to mean little and listen not at all..

As wounded men may limp through life, so our war minds may not regain the balance of their thoughts for decades..

Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible..

Literary people are forever judging the quality of the mind by the turn of expression..

If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of th….

Distaste sounds more emphatic when expressed as moral disapproval. With most of us the moral counterblast is nothing more than the angry rendering of….

Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours..

We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist..

Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape..

Every man ought to be inquisitive through every hour of his great adventure down to the day when he shall no longer cast a shadow in the sun. For if ….

When temptations march monotonously in regiments, one waits for to pass..

Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the ma….

Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest..

The world is a play that would not be worth seeing if we knew the plot..

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection..

Sin in this country has been always said to be rather calculating than impulsive..

One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal..

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on a….

I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top..