Twenty-four years ago I was strangely handsome; in San Francisco in the rainy season I was often mistaken for fair weather.

A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.

I have no respect for a man who can spell a word only one way.

[ To his wife Olivia, who had repeated his swearing :] You got the words right, Livy, but you don’t know the tune.

A lawyer one day spoke to him [Mark Twain] with his hands in his pockets. “Is it not a curious sight to see a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets?” remarked the humorist in his quiet drawl.

God made man, without man’s consent, andmade his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic, or I will punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for everything man does, all the same; He can’t get around that fact.There is only one Criminal, and it is not man.

[Christian nations are the most enlightenedand progressive] in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

[ On the Bible :] It is full of interest. It hasnoble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

[Man] has imagined a heaven, and has leftentirely out of it the supremest of all hisdelights, the one ecstasy that stands first andforemost in the heart of every individual ofhis race—and of ours—sexual intercourse!It is as if a lost and perishing person in aroasting desert should be told by a rescuer hemight choose and have all longed for thingsbut one, and he should elect to leave outwater!