Mark Twain

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.

The Public is merely a multiplied “me”.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then Success is sure.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

The self divides into ten billion distinct illuminating spirits. Distinguish these without falling into names and classifications.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

It’s powerful to have strong men but what does that strength mean?

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, or thoughts are affection; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is no part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

Any experience of reality is indescribable!

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.