Mark Twain

What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows – it must grow; nothing can prevent it.

Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.

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

Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

Socialists think profits are a vice; I consider losses the real vice.

Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.

Failure is an important part of your growth and developing resilience. Don’t be afraid to fail.

There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

Who prays for Satan? Who, in 1,800 years, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.

If a man’s fortune does not fit him, it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

Travel is a fools paradise.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.