Mark Twain

So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.

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

A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be lead by the nose.

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world – and never will.

There’s always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

I can only say that I have had a wonderful life.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words… the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

What is the purpose of life? I believe that the purpose of life is to be happy.

I’d never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds bigheaded, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn’t meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it.

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.

Once you discover that you can, then you must.

Every man is the architect of his own fortune.

Life is full of surprises, some good, some not so good.

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

My attitude is never to be satisfied, never enough, never.

If you wish to clear away the clouds of thought, simply keep your mind in the present.

We now know that anything which is economically right is also morally right. There can be no conflict between good economics and good morals.