Mark Twain

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

We have the best government that money can buy.

We need not worry so much about what man descends from; it’s what he descends to that shames the human race.

The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

If it be an evil to judge rashly or untruly any single man, how much a greater sin it is to condemn a whole people.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.