Mark Twain

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

Which is worse? The wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

We must train hard. It’s not about denying a weakness may exist but about denying its right to persist.

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

The man is either mad, or he is making verses.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

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.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.

Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.

Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.