Mark Twain

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.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

A crank is someone with a new idea – until it catches on.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.

The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

…with the black marble which gives the fireplace the air of a miniature family vault, to suggest early Victorian commercial respectability, belief in money, Bible fetichism, fear of hell always at war with fear of poverty, instinctive horror of the passionate character of art, love and Roman Catholic religion, and all the first fruits of plutocracy in the early generations of the industrial revolution.

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves.

Shut your mouth, close your lips, and say something!

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing –a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

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.

Be an opener of doors.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

Self-denial is not a virtue, it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.

It’s them as take advantage that get advantage I this world.