Mark Twain

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

When one has tasted it Watermelon he knows what the angels eat.

There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe… the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.

There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can.

I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished.

No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.

Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is providence.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

A verse from the Veda says, ‘What you see, you become.’ In other words, just the experience of perceiving the world makes you what you are. This is a quite literal statement.

We run to win, not just to be in the race.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

Real practice has no purpose or direction, so it can include everything that comes.