Mark Twain

So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious – except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can.

All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they’re a mighty ornery lot. It’s the way they’re raised.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

This ain’t fun. But you watch me, I’ll get it done.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Avoid flatterers, for they are thieves in disguise.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little, and therefore men should remedy suspicion by procuring to know more, and not keep their suspicions in smother.

Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn’t.

Events tend to recur in cycles.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg by the side of which more will be laid.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.