Mark Twain

What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows – it must grow; nothing can prevent it.

It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips.

Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

According to this law [the law of Dharma], you have a unique talent and a unique way of expressing it. There is something that you can do better than anyone else in the whole world–and for every unique talent and unique expression of that talent, there are also unique needs. When these needs are matched with the creative expression of your talent, that is the spark that creates affluence. Expressing your talents to fulfill needs creates unlimited wealth and abundance.

The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a years.

Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly.

Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.

I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.

It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

Every being is in search of truth, but small fears go on preventing you.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.