Mark Twain

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

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

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy-that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then Success is sure.

Sometimes the place you are used to is not the place you belong.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s wall is ablaze.

We are ashamed of our thoughts and often see them brought forth by others.

If you try to please everybody, somebody’s not going to like it.

Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Failure is an important part of your growth and developing resilience. Don’t be afraid to fail.

Certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we’re so fond of it.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.

He that hath knowledge spareth his words.

What a new face courage puts on everything!

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

Children are all foreigners.