“I have too much respect for the truth to drag it out on every trifling occasion.”

“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.”

“Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!”

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

“I don't know anything that mars a good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature.”

“There are some few people I respect and admire, but I don't think much of the species.”

“When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.”