Mark Twain

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.

Do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

Fly fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”

Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.