Mark Twain

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

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.

Round numbers are always false.

Just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who think diffenrently…

No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.

Tis admirable to consider, how Powerful the Kings are, yet they move by the Breath of their People.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

All diseases run into one, old age.

It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

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.

I want to be all used up when I die.

Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.