Mark Twain

Wit and Humor – if any difference, it is in duration – lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage – the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

The world is its own magic.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

There are no have-to’s, just choices.

Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?… What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

No one ever became great by imitation.

There is no daily chore so trivial that it cannot be made important by skipping it two days running.

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.

We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.