“Power is so pleasant that men quickly learn to be greedy in the enjoyment of it, and to flatter themselves that patriotism requires them to be imperious.”

Nothing surely is as potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water drop that hollows the stone.

It is a grand thing to rise in the world. The ambition to do so is the very salt of the earth. It is the parent of all enterprise, and the cause of all improvement.

Those who have courage to love should have courage to suffer.

I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover’s mind if she knew the whole of it.

Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.

It is very hard, that necessity of listening to a man who says nothing

Many people talk much, and then very many people talk very much more.

No other American city is so intensely American as New York.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

Speeches easy to young speakers are generally very difficult to old listeners.

It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.

Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.

When the little dog snarls, the big dog does not connect the snarl with himself, simply fancying that the little dog must be uncomfortable.

I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

Only God is able to humble us without humiliating us and to exalt us without flattering us.

Flattery and criticism are always in our profession.

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

Critics kind never mind! Critics flatter no matter! Critics blame all the same! Do your best damn the rest!

I want friends, not admirers. People who respect me for my character and my deeds, not my flattering smile.

I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.

Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered.