Mark Twain

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I’ve dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half… I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop…. I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn’t do it for fifteen.

Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.

He who would begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin.

A hen is only a egg’s way of making another egg.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Most people think that aging is irreversible and we know that there are mechanisms even in the human machinery that allow for the reversal of aging, through correction of diet, through anti-oxidants, through removal of toxins from the body, through exercise, through yoga and breathing techniques, and through meditation.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

Nothing astonishes people so much as common sense and plain dealing.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.

It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

Men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

What you don’t do can be a destructive force.

I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct – nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.