Mark Twain

There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me-I always feel that they have not said enough.

There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

The educated Southerner has no use for an ‘R’, except at the beginning of a word.

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious – except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one’s head.

The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.

Shut your mouth, close your lips, and say something!

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

The money men make lives after them.

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

Think with your whole body.

Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.