Mark Twain

In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?

We had the sky up there, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss whether they was made or just happened.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.

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

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

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.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles… but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief -a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

It’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.

Where God does not govern, tyrants will rule.

Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he wanted. He lived happily ever after.

A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

Don’t call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it’s not sexist.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

Avoid popularity it has many snares and no real benefit.