Mark Twain

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

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

By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then Success is sure.

Intellectual work is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.

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

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

Don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquility.

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Truth is a naked and open daylight.

I do not hesitate to read all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable – any real insight or broad human sentiment.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

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

More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower.