Daily Digest

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

“′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.”

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”

“I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.”

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”

“I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”

“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

“What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.”

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”

“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”

“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

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

“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”

“Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.”

“It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.”

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”

“The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.”

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

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

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

“Loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.”

“The less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.”

“Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.”

“Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.”

“The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.”

“I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.”

“To be busy is man's only happiness.”

“My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.”

“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

“I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.”