Mark Twain

The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle; …they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; …those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. It comes at last-the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them-and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence, …a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever.

There are two types of speakers, those that are nervous and those that are liars.

The trouble with you Chicago people is that you think you are the best people down here, whereas you are merely the most numerous.

We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again – and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s and each obeying its own law.

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

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.

Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

None of us should be defined by the worst thing we’ve ever done.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

Ahh, that mountain of self-discovery. Every time you have reached the summit, the clouds clear and you see there is still a ways to go. Don’t look up with thoughts of despair; thinking how much further do I have to go?! Take a moment and look back to see how far you have come. Don’t lose sight of your accomplishments, and focus on the continued commitment to self-discovery and development.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

I shall strike the stars with my unlifted head.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.