Mark Twain

Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.

There is a great deal of human nature in people.

If you have to eat a frog, don’t look at it for too long.

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

Man – a creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.

There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

For Wealth are all things that conduce, to one’s destruction or their use. A standard both to buy and sell, all things from heaven down to hell.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

Nay, number itself in armies importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for, as Virgil saith, It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.

Wise men make more opportunities than they find.

The highest panegyric, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

He has the deed half done who has made a beginning.

When things are steep, remember to stay level-headed.