Mark Twain

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

It is not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that make horseraces.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life;

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

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

In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.

It is not where you start but how high you aim that matters for success.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills;we shall never surrender.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.

Do the thing we fear, and the death of fear is certain.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Wear none of thine own Chains; but keep free, whilst thou art free.

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

We meet on the broad pathway of good faith and good will; no advantage shall be taken on either side, but all shall be openness and love. I will not call you children, — for parents sometimes chide their children too severely; nor brothers only, — for brothers differ. The friendship between me and you I will not compare to a chain; for that the rains might rust, or the falling tree might break. We are the same as if one man’s body were to be divided into two parts, we are all one flesh and blood.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.