Mark Twain

It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

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

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

For character too is a process and an unfolding… among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

The most dangerous people are those who have passion but lack wisdom.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life’s sorrows.

Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.