Mark Twain

Public opinion is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.

The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.

Fueling your body is a process… The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

Men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness.

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Only one is a wanderer; two together are always going somewhere.

We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.

In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.

Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it.

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.