Mark Twain

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

The person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn’t, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn’t likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.

What you possess, you lose.

To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his left and right hand. He uses both.

The whole secret of existence is to have no fear.

Zen has no business with ideas.

I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.

It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

God, grant us our desires, and grant them quickly.

It is easy to believe we are each waves and forget we are also the ocean.

Live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have.

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

Most people think that faith means believing something; oftener it means trying something, giving it a chance to prove itself.

Jesus tapped me on the shoulder and said, Bob, why are you resisting me? I said, I’m not resisting you! He said, You gonna follow me? I said, I’ve never thought about that before! He said, When you’re not following me, you’re resisting me.

I was kosher until I had my Bar Mitzvah, and I parlayed officially becoming a man into telling my father I wanted to eat cheeseburgers.