Mark Twain

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

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.

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

A home without a cat-and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat-may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to us than the 99 which we had to work for, and the money won at Faro or in the stock market snuggles into our hearts in the same way.

I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limit of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extravagance! it depends on how you are yarded.

Fear came in so much in my life that it did everything but completely stop me.

I am pretty fearless. You know why? Because I don’t handle fear very well; I’m not a good terrified person.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absense of fear.

Don’t be afraid of fear. Because it sharpens you, it challenges you, it makes you stronger; and when you run away from fear, you also run away from the opportunity to be your best possible self.

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

My greatest fear is getting bored.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn’t know what he is doing.