The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.
I'm a great believer in luck. I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
The best definition of humour I know is: humour may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof. I think this is the best I know because I wrote it myself.
You encourage a comic man too much, and he gets silly.
Any man will admit if need be that his sight is not good, or that he cannot swim or shoots badly with a rifle, but to touch upon his sense of humour is to give him mortal affront.
Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
Many a man in love with a dimple makes a mistake of marrying the whole girl.
It may be that those who do most, dream most.
Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself- it is the occurring which is difficult.
The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
The true professor of English would be a sort of inspired person, a little silly, fond of reciting and reading aloud, unconscious of time and place, filled with intense admiration and terrific denunciations, admired and pitied by his students. Such a man with his childish conceit, his tattered wits, his flushed cheeks, and his transparent sincerity is the inspiration of the classroom, — he is the spirit of literature itself. Can a man like that examine ? Of course not. He lets them all through. But even the least gifted has caught something of our inspiration.
Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.
The landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram - that is, an oblong angular figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything.
Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets.
On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two charges for the same thing.
