Mark Twain

Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

Adam was but human-this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one’s head.

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

I do not like work even when someone else does it.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most.

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

The true poem is the poet’s mind.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.

They that deny a God destroy man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

Virtue is too often merely local.

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.