Mark Twain

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then Success is sure.

We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

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

The sense of an entailed disadvantage – the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

Humility like the darkness, reveals the heavenly lights.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

New arts destroy the old.

If you learn to practice love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, you will know how to heal the illnesses of anger, sorrow, insecurity, sadness, hatred, loneliness, and unhealthy attachments.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.