Mark Twain

I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter’s evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream… I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people’s tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.

Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks, if we agree with him.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

Nothing is pleasant that is not spiced with variety.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

Clogged with yesterday’s excess, the body drags the mind down with it.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

This is the foundation of all. We are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

She has taken a patronizing fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his social position.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.

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

The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one’s clothes.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.