Mark Twain

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.

When in doubt tell the truth.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and new.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

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.

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

It’s the ones that stayed after the Exodus, that I knew were real and could handle the truth; that would stay with me on my journey, for better or worse.

Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

It is generally known, that he who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any effect other than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

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

The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.

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

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.