Mark Twain

It is at our mother’s knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.

Intellectual work is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy-that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.

Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race – the individual’s distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety’s or comfort’s sake, to stand well in his neighbor’s eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.

There is no such thing as the Queen’s English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

There be three things which make a nation great and prosperous: a fertile soil, busy workshops, easy conveyance for men and goods from place to place.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.

I heartily accept the motto,That government is best which governs least; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.