Mark Twain

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

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

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered – either by themselves or by others.

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

In this country it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

Where Example keeps pace with Authority, Power hardly fails to be obey’d.

I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

I always forgive others. The anger; sadness; frustration; pain, whatever feelings I felt, no matter the hurt; the tears, I always found understanding and reason to forgive them; to not hold onto it; to not resent them. But there is one, who I never seem to be able to give absolution, and that’s myself.

Nay, number itself in armies importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for, as Virgil saith, It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.