Mark Twain

One may make their house a palace of sham, or they can make it a home, a refuge.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.

A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.

If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.

Sometimes too much drink is barely enough.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

Life is largely a matter of expectation.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

The real satisfaction which praise can afford, is when what is repeated aloud agrees with the whispers of conscience, by showing us that we have not endeavored to deserve well in vain.

It is easy – terribly easy – to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.

The French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are.

He looks the whole world in the face for he owes not any man.

Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it.