Mark Twain

True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is providence.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most impeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an out-lying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

I was born upon thy bank, river, my blood flows in thy stream, and thou meanderest forever. At the bottom of my dream.

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead – and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.

Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

It is a severe Rebuke upon us, that God makes us so many Allowances, and we make so few to our Neighbor: As if Charity had nothing to do with Religion; Or Love with Faith, that ought to work by it.

Anger is a brief lunacy.

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.

For character too is a process and an unfolding… among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?