Mark Twain

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

It isn’t safe to sit in judgment upon another person’s illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

With all the doubt, with every worry, with all the negativity that I mistook for honesty, it kept me blinded. Lying for so long, I fooled myself in believing it to be my reality. And living in that world, it was my reality. Like when the lights come on, or when the curtains are drawn back, the shock of the clarity, meant I had to adjust to the new world I was witnessing. An honest; good with the bad, world, that I can thrive and grow in.

Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Count on it, if a person talks of their misfortune, there is something in it that is not disagreeable to them.

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

Kings are not born they are made by universal hallucination.

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.