Mark Twain

I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

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 usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

It was the schoolboy who said, Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.

Self-suggestion makes you master of yourself.

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.

God is better served in resisting a Temptation to Evil, than in many formal Prayers.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

You are braver than you believe. Stronger than you seem. And smarter than you think.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.

If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.

This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.