Mark Twain

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a noble animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward-you will never get her full confidence again.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

The Public is merely a multiplied “me”.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Far too many executives have become more concerned with the four P’s – pay, perks, power and prestige – rather than making profits for shareholders.

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.

I would live to study, and not study to live.

When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief.

See, I think you live on earth a certain number of times until you finish what it is that you were meant to do here. And then you go on. I don’t think I’ll be back here. I think I’m done.

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

A mother’s yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

Men have become the tools of their trade.