Mark Twain

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain’t so.

In his private heart no man much respects himself.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

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

As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.

Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.

Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.

I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.

I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most.