Mark Twain

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

I think a compliment ought to always precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.

Never do wrong when people are looking.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

Learn to say “I don’t know.” If used when appropriate, it will be often.

Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.

Responsibility is the price of greatness.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

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

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

All Excess is ill: But Drunkenness is of the worst Sort. It spoils Health, dismounts the Mind, and unmans Men: It reveals Secrets, is Quarrelsome, Lascivious, Impudent, Dangerous and Mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a Man: Because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.