Mark Twain

Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it. It is unsuited to the drawing room, and in the most cultured society it has long been banished from the social board. It has at last, in our day of progress and improvement, been degraded to brotherhood with flatulence. Among the best bred, these two arts are now indulged only in private– though by consent of the whole company, when only males are present, it is still permissible, in good society, to remove the embargo on the fundamental sigh.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.

If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.

If they had not landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact.

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.

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

A physician’s physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric’s divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.

The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s house is in flames.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. 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.

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

The first thing a great person does, is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come, I’ll sit up and sing.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‘to do’ list.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.