Mark Twain

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

Never put off until tomorrow, what you can put off until the day after tomorrow.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the prompting of a brave, determined spirit.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

One thing you learn: if you want to reveal yourself, you also have to know where to stop.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

Nothing does Reason more Right, than the Coolness of those that offer it: for Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected, and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be super added.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.