Mark Twain

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought – by force of circumstances, not argument – to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them.

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

Women tell men things that they are not likely to find out for themselves.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.

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

Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

When we direct our thoughts properly, we can control our emotions…

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.