Mark Twain

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

To succeed in life, you need to things: ignorance and confidence.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Sir, that all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Truth is a naked and open daylight.

If you want the time to pass quickly, just give your note for 90 days.

No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.

We hate the kindness which we understand.

To hazard much to get much has more of avarice than wisdom.

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else – these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?