Mark Twain

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.

We Americans… bear the ark of liberties of the world.

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

Stars are good too. I wish I could get some to put in my hair. But I suppose I never can. You would be surprised to find how far off they are, for they do not look it. When they first showed last night I tried to knock some down with a pole, but it didn’t reach, which astonished me. Then I tried clods till I was all tired out, but I never got one. I did make some close shots, for I saw the black blot of the clod sail right into thee midst of the golden clusters forty or fifty times, just barely missing them, and if I could’ve held out a little longer, maybe I could’ve got one.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Obscurity and competence: That is the life that is worth living.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

Ask counsel of both timesof the ancient time what is best, and of the latter time what is fittest.

Above anything else, I hate to lose.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.

It is possible to be free and loving no matter what your circumstances.

No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.

No matter how hard the past is, we can always begin again.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

If we are but sure the end is right, we are too apt to gallop over all bounds to compass it; not considering the lawful ends may be very unlawfully attained.

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.