Mark Twain

If to be interesting is to be uncommonplace, it is becoming a question, with me, if there are any commonplace people.

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.

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

All promise outruns performance.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

If a man’s fortune does not fit him, it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

The true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

Courage is exhilarating.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.