Mark Twain

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

It is a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

I think a compliment ought to always precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.

It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.

I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

If a man’s fortune does not fit him, it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.

Some men do as much begrudge others a good name, as they want one themselves: and perhaps that is the reason of it.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

After a few months’ acquaintance with European coffee, one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

God’s first creature, which was light.

Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.

We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.