When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.
Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
There is not a single celebrated Southern name in any of the departments of human industry except those of war, assassination, lynching, murder, the duel, repudiation, & massacre.
Pilgrim's Progress , about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.
The convention missionaries call "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anybody's whim - anybody's diseased caprice.
Man is the only religious animal. In the Holy task of smoothing his brother's path to the happiness of heaven, he has turned the globe into a graveyard.
A brown spotted lady-bug climbed the dizzy height of a grass blade, and Tom bent down close to it and said, "Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children's alone," and she took wing and went off to see about it -- which did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity more than once.
I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.
A marriage...makes of two fractional lives a whole; it gives to two purposeless lives a work, and doubles the strength of each to perform it; it gives to two questioning natures a reason for living, and something to live for; it will give a new gladness to the sunshine, a new fragrance to the flowers, a new beauty to the earth, and a new mystery to life.
So you see, the quality of humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It's as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.