The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

Dancing is a wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.

When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.

Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities.

Be prepared for truth at all hours and in the most fantastic disguises. This is the only safety.

Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late...?

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.

God made man merely to hear some praise of what he'd done on those Five Days.

Only the sinner has the right to preach.

Truth, like milk, arrives in the dark But even so, wise dogs don't bark. Only mongrels make it hard For the milkman to come up the yard.

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

If you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn't so.

The censure of a dog is something no man can stand.

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.