Mark Twain

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

Be virtuous and you will be eccentric.

I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly.

It all depends on you. You can go on sleeping forever, you can wake up right this moment.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

Our thinking and our behaviour are always in anticipation of a response. It is therefore fear-based.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

It is a strange desire, to seek power and lose liberty, or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man’s self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains, and it is sometimes base; and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing.

Fearful of missing anything, he read on, filled with this anticipation which was half terror, of coming upon something which would touch him, not simply touch him but lift him and carry him away.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.