Mark Twain

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. (The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.)

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

All you need to be a success is ignorance and self confidence.

Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.

There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.

Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.

The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

Anger is short madness