Emotions and Feelings

He will lie even when it is inconvenient, the sign of the true artist.

Les sanglots longs

Dieu créa l’homme, et ne le trouvant pas assez seul, il lui donne une compagne pour lui faire mieux sentir sa solitude .

[ On Ted Williams’s last baseball game at FenwayPark, Boston, Mass. :] Our noise for someseconds passed beyond excitement into akind of immense open anguish, a cry to besaved. But immortality is nontransferable. Thepapers said that the other players, and eventhe umpires on the field, begged him to comeout and acknowledge us in some way, but henever had and did not now. Gods do not answerletters.

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

[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!

To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was tautology.

“Classic.” A book which people praise and don’t read.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’tstraight.

Thanksgiving Day . Let us all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys; they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!—incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!—incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.

Dying man couldn’t make up his mind which place to go to—both have their advantages, “heaven for climate, hell for company!”

Don’t you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardnessand stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to.

A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.