Mark Twain

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

Don’t tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.

It was the schoolboy who said, Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.

Children are all foreigners.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life. Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls. We are weaned from our timidity In the flush of love’s light we dare be brave And suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

And deep in my heart. The answer, it was in me. And I made up my mind. To define my own destiny.

Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.

The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.