“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”

I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.

I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!

I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

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.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

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

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

Obscurity and a competence – that is the life that is best worth living.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.

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