Mark Twain

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

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.

Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.

Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.

Learn to say “I don’t know.” If used when appropriate, it will be often.

A home without a cat-and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat-may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I’m sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

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

He that has more knowledge than judgment, is made for another man’s use more than his own.

Never learn to do anything. If you don’t learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends… Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.