Mark Twain

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

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 is not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that make horseraces.

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

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

The trouble with you Chicago people is that you think you are the best people down here, whereas you are merely the most numerous.

Ready are you? What know you of ready?

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

Self-realization is effortless. What you are trying to find is what you already are.

What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?

He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

Just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who think diffenrently…

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

When the eye is not set on one leaf and you face the tree with nothing in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.