Mark Twain

Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.

There’s always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

You have to know how to defend yourself.

The basically simple things are best, whether it’s automobiles or diets or philosophy.

Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. (The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.)

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.

Smiling is one of the highest forms of meditation.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

I want to be a hero, a small and good kind of hero, even though I know heroes have very short lives.

The finest clothing made is a person’s own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.

Whenever you get the idea that you are ‘fixed’ or that anything is ‘fixed’ for life, you’d better get ready for a sudden change.

Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.

People are used to being coddled.

A problem is a chance for you to do your best.

Drama and crisis are currency to them because they love the power to make people react. They thrive on a good fight, a good scandal, a good drama.