Mark Twain

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

I smoke in moderation, only one cigar at a time.

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

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

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.

The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.

What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

Sometimes the place you are used to is not the place you belong.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

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.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior.

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.