Mark Twain

Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time.

Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

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.

It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

Hurricanes are named after people, baby, and I hope you know that falling in love with me will be so much more treacherous than boarding up the windows and waiting for me to pass.

That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started.

Nature hates calculators.

Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it.

You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.