Mark Twain

If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”

When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.

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

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

Where Example keeps pace with Authority, Power hardly fails to be obey’d.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

If thou wouldst rule well, thou must rule for God; and to do that, thou must be ruled by him who has given to kings his grace to command themselves and their subjects, and to the people the grace to obey God and their kings.

Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray one.

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

Responsibility is the price of greatness.