Mark Twain

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 repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.

A joke, even if it be a lame one, is nowhere so keenly relished or quickly applauded as in a murder trial.

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

More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.

I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.

God almighty first planted a garden: and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasure.

We are desire. It is the essence of the human Soul, the secret of our existence. Absolutely nothing of human greatness is ever accomplished without it. Not a symphony has been written, a mountain climbed, an injustice fought, or a love sustained apart from desire. Desire fuels our search for the life we prize. – John Elderidge

The Zen expression Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.

Each step along the Buddha’s path to happiness requires practising mindfulness until it becomes part of your daily life.

You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.

Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?

Zen mind is not Zen mind. Throwing away Zen mind is correct Zen mind.

You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.

I dressed the part and slipped into my Sunday best. I peeled open the heavy doors to every church I could find.

In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.

To be calm is the highest achievement of the self.

What you possess, you lose.

Believe in something larger than yourself…get involved in the big ideas of your time.

The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.