Mark Twain

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.

We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks, if we agree with him.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon

I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.

There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

If a man’s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one’s self-approval.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

The idea of perfection always gives one a chance to talk without knowing facts.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Love grows. Lust wastes by Enjoyment, and the Reason is, that one springs from an Union of Souls, and the other from an Union of Sense.

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.