Mark Twain

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

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows – it must grow; nothing can prevent it.

Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.

Be passionate about something and lean to that strength.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

Rarely promise, but, if lawful, constantly perform.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

If you develop rules, never have more than ten.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

There’s much more stupidity than there is malice in the world.

There is in the act of preparing, the moment you start caring.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

There was the cell where Fr. Eulalio, a thriving lunatic of eighty-six who was castigating himself for unchristian pride at having all the vowels in his name, and greatly revered for his continuous weeping, went blind in an ecstasy of such howling proportions that his canonization was assured.

The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.