Mark Twain

History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot

We are all alike, on the inside.

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

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

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.

Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

The eye is easily frightened.

He has the deed half done who has made a beginning.

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.

Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life — some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed — because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.

Who prays for Satan? Who, in 1,800 years, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

In the word of no master am I bound to believe.

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.

I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.