Mark Twain

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

There’s always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.

Public opinion is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.

Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy-that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it… Beware of me, it says, but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.

I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

You sold me a dream and it shattered. I didn’t know how to put it back together again. So instead, I’m lovingly gluing those fragments anew with seams of gold, creating a vibrant new dream, rendering the broken strong and more than ever, breathtakingly beautiful.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Live as brave men and face adversity with stout hearts.

No man is much regarded by the rest of the world. He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others, will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself. While we see multitudes passing before us, of whom perhaps not one appears to deserve our notice or excites our sympathy, we should remember, that we likewise are lost in the same throng, that the eye which happens to glance upon us is turned in a moment on him that follows us, and that the utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear is to fill a vacant hour with prattle, and be forgotten.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.

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

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

Our best thoughts come from others.