Mark Twain

Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know.

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.

Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.

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.

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.

Events tend to recur in cycles…

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.

You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell: All hope abandon ye who enter here.

Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.

When the righteous man truth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.

Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.

Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

It is by the goodness of God that we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.