“Children read their favorite books to death, she said. They are careless in their devotions. They rip the pages, scribble, and spill things on them. And they are demon book thieves.”

“I know many married men, I even know a few happily married men, but I don't know one who wouldn't fall down the first open coal hole running after the first pretty girl who gave him a wink.”

“Love demands infinitely less than friendship.”

“An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.”

“Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry.”

“Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.”

“A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.”

“Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics. Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor.”

“Politics is the diversion of trivial men who when they succeed at it become important in the eyes of more trivial men.”

“Love demands infinitely less than friendship.”

“There is something distinguished about even his failures they sink not trivially but with a certain air of majesty like a great ship its flags flying full of holes.”