Mark Twain

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

Be virtuous and you will be eccentric.

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

The trouble with you Chicago people is that you think you are the best people down here, whereas you are merely the most numerous.

In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion – several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.

A word once uttered can never be recalled.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lift human life above the level of farce and give it some of the grace of tragedy.

Practice is this life, and realization is this life, and this life is revealed right here and now.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

The English never draw a line without blurring it.

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size But when I start to tell them, They think I’m telling lies. I say, It’s in the reach of my arms The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me.

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

Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.

Nothing is real.