Mark Twain

If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails – aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

There is still vitality under the winter snow, even though to the casual eye it seems to be dead.

We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.

Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

The first thing a great person does, is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.

Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn’t something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly – a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.

It is the amends of a short and troublesome life, that doing good and suffering ill entitles man to a longer and better

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

Do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people to protect themselves from talented people…

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.