Mark Twain

A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to us than the 99 which we had to work for, and the money won at Faro or in the stock market snuggles into our hearts in the same way.

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion – several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

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

No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

Say what you have to say and first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending; sit down.

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

How hard you work matters more than how much you make.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.