Mark Twain

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

If you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day will be wonderful.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

Work like you don’t need the money, love like you’ve never been hurt, and dance like nobody is watching.

Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.

The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers.

Surely life, if it be not long, is tedious, since we are forced to call in the assistance of so many trifles to rid us of our time, of that time which never can return.

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.

In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities.

I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

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

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.