Poems List

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

If the secret of being a bore is to tell all, the secret of pleasing is to say just enough to be --not understood, but divined.

Man is the inventor of stupidity.

Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.

Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

Industry has operated against the artisan in favor of the idler, and also in favor of capital and against labor. Any mechanical invention whatsoever has been more harmful to humanity than a century of war.

If you steal from one author, its plagiarism. If you steal from two, its research.

Popularity is exhausting. The life of the party almost always winds up in a corner with an overcoat over him.

A fellow who is always declaring that he's no fool, usually has his suspicions.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Be nice to people on your way up because you'll meet them on your way down.

I have known countless people who were reservoirs of learning, but never had a thought.

The worst tempered people I have ever met were those who knew that they were wrong.

Don't talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave.

In polite society one laughs at all the jokes, including the ones one has heard before.

The news of any politician's death should be listed under Public Improvements.

Blessed is he who talks in circles, for he shall become a big wheel.

A set of rules laid out by professionals to show the way they would like to act if it was profitable.

A conservative is a fellow who thinks a rich man should have a square deal.

Preachers denounce sin as if it was available to everyone.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

A man who calls bullshit fertilizer.