Mark Twain

Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

We have the best government that money can buy.

I don’t know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin

There is no such thing as the Queen’s English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.

Exploring the mysteries of myself and the world. Sensual, powerful, wise… on my path…

If you wish me to weep, you must first show grief yourself.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

He who has made it a practice to lie and deceive his father, will be the most daring in deceiving others.

There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.