Mark Twain

Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.

Let us endeavor to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

The way you think, the way you behave, the way you eat, can influence your life by 30 to 50 years.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?

Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

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

So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person’s genius is confined to a very few hours.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.