Mark Twain

In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it – and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again – and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

And of all the things I look forward to in life, falling in love with you is at the top of the list.

We have enough in our country to let us deep into the springs of human life if we only cherished what we have.

It isn’t true that you live only once. You only die once. You live lots of times if you know how.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

No dog ever peed on a moving car.

Your feelings? To hell with your feelings!

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

If you genuinely want something, don’t wait for it — teach yourself to be impatient.

You gotta do what you love and really believe in it because that is your truth.

We want to reproduce all those instruments which were prepared and used in America once upon a time.

Our life before moving to Washington was filled with simple joys. Saturdays at soccer games, Sundays at Grandma’s house. And a date night for Barack and me was either dinner or a movie, because as an exhausted mom, I couldn’t stay awake for both. He was still the guy who’d picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger-side door.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

In the 80s, when I was a little girl, this whole Midtown area was a different world. These are the streets that I walked, and learned my lessons on, and heard the music, and witnessed disenfranchised people, and people who just had dreams and hopes. Every pimp, every prostitute, every drug dealer, every Broadway dreamer wishing they could be a writer, or a musician, or an actor.