Mark Twain

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

One may make their house a palace of sham, or they can make it a home, a refuge.

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else – these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

Your dreams may have shattered, but that doesn’t mean they are over. They can still be turned into a mosaic of success.

In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

Let him that would move the world, first move himself.

Avoid inquisitive persons, for they are sure to be gossips, their ears are open to hear, but they will not keep what is entrusted to them.

All say, How hard it is that we have to die – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.