Mark Twain

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time.

If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.

I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.

We must substitute courage for caution.

When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief.

Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

It is a profitable Wisdom to know when we have done enough: Much time and Pains are spared, in not flattering our selves against Probabilities.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

It is nobler to be good, and it is nobler to teach others to be good – and less trouble!

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.