Mark Twain

Sometimes too much drink is barely enough.

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read.

The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.

If to be interesting is to be uncommonplace, it is becoming a question, with me, if there are any commonplace people.

More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.

There are two types of speakers, those that are nervous and those that are liars.

It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.

Our faith comes in moments… yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder?

One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.

The reward of one’s duty is the power to fulfill another.

Necessity, who is the mother of invention.

All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.