Mark Twain

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I’ve dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half… I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop…. I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn’t do it for fifteen.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Stay with me,’ he said, ‘until the sun goes out, the seas are parched, and the wind draws its last breath.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

Pity the man who has a character to support – it is worse than a large family – he is silent poor indeed.

I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.

The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

Merry Christmas! the man threatened.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means – one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

One cause, which is not always observed, of the insufficiency of riches, is that they very seldom make their owner rich.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.