Mark Twain

No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.

Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

The practice of Zen is forgetting the self in the act of uniting with something.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity.

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.

Buddhist practice is simply a system directed to the one end of lessening the suffering of life.

If you want to climb a mountain, begin at the top.

Outside the kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than any other. God and history will remember your judgment.

We can do no great things, only small things with great love.

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

Inspiring others towards happiness brings you happiness.

I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.

One must be deeply aware of the impermanence of the world.

Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that prevents evil from arising in either.

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea.

The essence of Buddhism is, if you can, to help others. If not, then at least refrain from hurting others.