Mark Twain

What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

The billiard table is better than the doctor.

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

Sorrow makes us children again.

Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.

How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?

Some men do as much begrudge others a good name, as they want one themselves: and perhaps that is the reason of it.

America is another name for opportunity.

The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.