Mark Twain

If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value.

It is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absense of fear.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

His money is twice tainted: taint yours and taint mine.

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

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

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

We can’t plan life. All we can do is be available for it.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity: no really self-respecting woman would take advantage of it.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

Practice is this life, and realization is this life, and this life is revealed right here and now.

Truth is the summit of being justice is the application of it to affairs.