Mark Twain

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.

Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

When it comes to the story of my heart, I am the villain, locking it away; denying its right be free. The chains are tight, restricting its growth; long enough to see through the window of opportunity, but the only escape it has, is via the pen. Why do I deny myself the opportunities? I know it comes from a place of protection, but also of fear. I think my heart has grown a resentment because of this betrayal, and has decided, enough is enough.

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

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

Try, try, try, and keep on trying is the rule that must be followed to become an expert in anything.

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

A man’s personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.

I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else – these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose – some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?

If men be good, government cannot be bad.