Mark Twain

A jay hasnt got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.

Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

There is no daily chore so trivial that it cannot be made important by skipping it two days running.

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

We falsely attribute to men a determined character, putting together all their yesterdays and averaging them, we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support, it is worse than a large family, he is the silent poor indeed.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

He tosses aside his paint-pots and his words a foot and a half long.

The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

Women are like tea bags. You never know how strong they are until they are in hot water.

Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.