Mark Twain

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I’ve dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half… I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop…. I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn’t do it for fifteen.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.

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

That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.

The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life’s sorrows.

It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven’t started wondering about yet.

It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.

It is not where you start but how high you aim that matters for success.

I always feel excited when I can do something that’s about what I believe in.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

Humility like the darkness, reveals the heavenly lights.

How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.

The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.

If you want to get what you want give up being right.

An index is a great leveller.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.