Mark Twain

All you need to be a success is ignorance and self confidence.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon

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

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

Because they did not see merit where they should have seen it, people, to express their regret, will go and leave a lot of money to the very people who will be the first to throw stones at the next person who has anything to say and finds a difficulty in getting a hearing.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

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

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

Why is that others have so much faith in me, while I have so little? Why can’t I have the same belief in me that they have? Why can’t I see in myself, what they do? What is it that makes me, hold myself back? How many more hurdles do I need to overcome? There are so many questions that I have to find the answers to. And I will only find them by focusing and being completely honest with myself.

The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this. He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent – for every effect a perfect cause – and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you’ve taught him everything else first?