Mark Twain

What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one’s self-approval.

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money of them.

It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone… I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

We are just statistics, born to consume resources.

If you develop rules, never have more than ten.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself; nothing, but the triumph of principles.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.

PATIENCE YOU MUST HAVE my young padawan.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.