Mark Twain

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

A healthy body is a guest chamber for the soul: a sick body is a prison.

If you protect a man from folly, you will soon have a nation of fools.

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

A wise man makes what he learns his own, the other shows he is but a copy or a collection at most.

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals – this alone is worth the struggle.

The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

You don’t create things, you discover things.

Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

He who has never hoped can never despair.

It is of no consequence of what parents a man is born, as long as he be a man of merit.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

When you’re first figuring yourself out, you care so much about what people think of you.