Mark Twain

Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.

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.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child’s rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore.

The less government we have the better.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Fearful of missing anything, he read on, filled with this anticipation which was half terror, of coming upon something which would touch him, not simply touch him but lift him and carry him away.

Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.