Mark Twain

I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases

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.

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious – except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

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

In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities.

Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.

The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

I don’t do quagmires.

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

If a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps. If he says perhaps he means no. And if he says no, he’s the hell of a diplomat.

The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

Be passionate about something and lean to that strength.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

Once we recognize that all things are impermanent, we have no problem enjoying them.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

Fatigue makes cowards of us all.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.