Mark Twain

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value.

Better a broken promise than none at all.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion – several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.

The ordinary mind is the way.

Be kind to all creatures; this is the true religion.

A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.

The Zen expression Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.

I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about.

I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t.

The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman’s construction, is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life. During twenty-three days in every month (in the absence of pregnancy) from the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle. Competent every day, competent every night. Also, she wants that candle – yearns for it, longs for it, hankers after it, as commanded by the law of God in her heart.

The Kingdom of God is Within You,

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

Music brought me closer to the idea of God.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

Harmonizing opposites by going back to their source is the distinctive quality of the Zen attitude, the Middle Way: embracing contradictions, making a synthesis of them, achieving balance.

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.