Mark Twain

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist’s custom.

Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read.

In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

If a man’s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

A sect or party is an incognito devised to save man from the vexation of thinking.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

Force may make hypocrites, but it can never make converts.

It is more agreeable to have the power to give than to receive.

Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

If you develop rules, never have more than ten.

The measure of a great leader, is their success in bringing everyone around to their opinion twenty years later.