Mark Twain

I do not like work even when someone else does it.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.

I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s wall is ablaze.

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.

God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.

Water is the only drink for a wise man.

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet, drink, and botanical medicines.

It’s not whether you get knocked down, its whether you get back up.

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…

Poets wish to profit or to please.

If you weren’t such a great man, you’d be a terrible bore.