Mark Twain

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

I would rather have my ignorance than another man’s knowledge, because I have so much of it.

God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.

Thou shalt not commit adultry is a command which makes no distinction between the following persons. They are all required to obey it: children at birth. Children in the cradle. School children. Youths and maidens. Fresh adults. Older ones. Men and women of 40. Of 50. Of 60. Of 70. Of 80. Of 100. The command does not distribute its burden equally, and cannot. It is not hard upon the three sets of children.

More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

To be good is not enough; a man must be good for something.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

One day I will kiss you, kiss you with lips that understand, kiss you with lips that can better explain, that can speak in so many languages. They will know how to say I love you in ways you have never heard, in ways that sound unlike anything any other man has mouthed before, false promises and fairy tales they did not ever believe in. One day I will kiss you, pressed words between your lips. I will kiss you and they will rattle between your teeth, run down your throat, and fill your lungs. They will echo against your ribs, they will reverberate through your limbs, they will dress every corner you’ve kept sadness hidden away until all that grows inside of you is the understanding that you are enough. One day I will tell you all about my paper napkin theories, algorithms I formed that demonstrate how the sum of all that you are, is greater than infinity, but to me you have always been the one.

Water from the white fountain didn’t taste any better than from the black fountain.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?

Don’t be afraid of the space between your dreams and reality. If you can dream it, you can make it so.

No American ought to be compelled to strike for his rights. He ought to receive them naturally, easily, as a matter of course.

When you embark for strange places don’t leave any of yourself safely at the shore… Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.

To me, you’ll always be the rising suns, the sinking moons, and all the stars that come between the sound of rain and river stones, the warmth of my sheets, the ache in my bones.

In Nevada, for a time, the lawyer, the editor, the banker, the chief desperado, the chief gambler, and the saloon-keeper occupied the same level of society, and it was the highest.

You can do anything, but not everything.