Mark Twain

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absense of fear.

Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.

I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

Sometimes too much drink is barely enough.

No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

When Satan makes impure verses, Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

Courtesy Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven’t courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.

There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.