Mark Twain

Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life;

Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.

Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

Our best history is still poetry.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.

The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure anybody has, is his personal dignity.

Every time I think I have reached the peak, I look up and see I still have a ways to go. But I look back and see just how far I have come.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

Men being born with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature . . . no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political view of another, without his consent.

Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn’t.