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"I have had an aversion to good spelling for sixty years and more, merely for the reason that when I was a boy there was not a thing I could do creditably except spell according to the book. It was a poor and mean distinction, and I early learned to disenjoy it. I suppose that this is because the ability to spell correctly is a talent, not an acquirement. There is some dignity about an acquirement, because it is a product of your own labor. It is earned, whereas to be able to do a thing merely by the grace of God, and not by your own effort, transfers the thing to our heavenly home--where possibly it is a matter of pride and satisfaction, but it leaves you naked and bankrupt."
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"Every man has a specific skill, whether it is discovered or not, that more readily and naturally comes to him than it would to another, and his own should be sought and polished. He excels best in his niche - originality loses its authenticity in one's efforts to obtain originality."
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Personal Development
"If you want to be a calligrapher, write, and write, and write."
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Personal Development
"It is the goldsmith who can assay the gold."
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Personal Development
"Skill to do comes of doing."
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Personal Development
"The key is in the craft."
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Personal Development
"The master initiate of any craft appears magical to the uninitiated."
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Personal Development
"Tengo had a gift for such work. He was a born technician, possessing both the intense concentration of a bird sailing through the air in search of prey and the patience of a donkey hauling water, playing always by the rules of the game."
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Personal Development
"A whetstone, though it cannot cut, may sharpen a knife that will."
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Personal Development
"Every habit makes our hand more witty, and out wit more handy."
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Personal Development
"A good marksman may miss."
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"Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."
Life
"The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up."
Happiness
"In the afternoon the ship's company assembled aft, on deck, under the awnings; the flute, the asthmatic meodeon, and the consumptive clarinet crippled the Star Spangled Banner, the choir chased it to cover, and George came in with a peculiarly lacerating screech on the final note and slaughtered it. Nobody mourned. We carried out the corpse on three cheers (that joke was not intentional and I do not endorse it)."
Humor
"When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved."
Society
"One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke."
Writing
"The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little."
Wisdom
"Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside."
Happiness
"Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do."
Writing
"Schoolboy days are no happier than the days of afterlife, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed - because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of the canonized ethic and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden-sword pageants, and its fishing holidays."
Reflection
"T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others."
Writing
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