Only the sinner has the right to preach.

Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you’re not really interested in order to get where you’re going.

If you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn’t so.

From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes, and I mean to make the best of my chance.

America is still a government of the naive, for the naive, and by the naive. He who does not know this, nor relish it, has no inkling of the nature of his country.

Man, an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind; and it didn’t seem to matter.

When you sell a man a book you don’t sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night – there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

The trouble with wedlock is that there’s not enough wed and too much lock.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

There is only one rule for being a good talker – learn to listen.

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

God made man merely to hear some praise of what he’d done on those Five Days.

If we discovered that we only had five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.

The censure of a dog is something no man can stand.

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

Words are a commodity in which there is never any slump.

Men talk of “finding God,” but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden in that darkest hiding-place, your heart. You yourself are a part of Him.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.

One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings.

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

Act like you expect to get into the end zone.

Why do they put the Gideon bibles only in the bedrooms, where it’s usually too late?

We call a child‘s mind ‘small‘ simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours is, for it can take in almost anything without effort.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

It’s a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.

There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.

New York, the nation‘s thyroid gland.

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.