Quotes to inspire and reflect

I have done more for San Francisco than any of its old residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more - I could have gone earlier - it was suggested.

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.

Quitting smoking is easy, I've done it hundreds of times.

The bane of Americans is overwork-and the ruin of any work is a divided interest. Concentrate-concentrate. One thing at a time .

You can't pray a lie -- I found that out.

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.

We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.

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

God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

We Americans... bear the ark of liberties of the world.

One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.

It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.

It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive .

That's the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don't care, individuals do.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

It is your human environment that makes climate

No one is willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances.

I do not like an injurious lie, except when it injures somebody else.

There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad.

I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately .

He was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie.

The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.

The primary rule of business success is loyalty to your employer. That's all right as a theory. What is the matter with loyalty to yourself?

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind.

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

It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals.

Experience, the only logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to rugged health.

What is the chief end of man?-to get rich. In what way?-dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.

Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded.

Broad, wholesome, charitable views .. can not be acquired by vegetating in one's little corner of the earth.

For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness.

Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination ?

Of the 417 commandments, only a single one of the 417 has found ministerial obedience; multiply and replenish the earth. To it sinner & saint, scholar & ignoramus, Christian & savage are alike loyal.

I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else... I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.

Many people have the reasoning facility, but no one uses it in religious matters .

God has put something noble and good into every heart His hand created.

There are two things nobody should ever have to watch being made, sausage and laws.

Too bad that youth is wasted on the young.

Gratitude and treachery are merely the two extremities of the same procession. You have seen all of it that is worth staying for when the band and the gaudy officials have gone by.